Search Results
Discussion Paper
Everything You Wanted to Know about the Tri-Party Repo Market, but Didn't Know to Ask
The tri-party repo market is a large and important market where securities dealers find short-term funding for a substantial portion of their own and their clients’ assets. The Task Force on Tri-Party Repo Infrastructure (Task Force) noted in its report that “(a)t several points during the financial crisis of 2007-2009, the tri-party repo market took on particular importance in relation to the failures and near-failures of Countrywide Securities, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers.” In this post, we provide an overview of this market and discuss several reforms currently under way ...
Discussion Paper
The Odd Behavior of Repo Haircuts during the Financial Crisis
Since the financial crisis began, there’s been substantial debate on the role of haircuts in U.S. repo markets. (The haircut is the value of the collateral in excess of the value of the cash exchanged in the repo; see our blog post for more on repo markets.) In an influential paper, Gorton and Metrick show that haircuts increased rapidly during the crisis, a phenomenon they characterize as a general “run on repo.” Consequently, some policymakers and academics have considered whether regulating haircuts might help stabilize the repo markets, for example, by setting a minimum level so ...
Discussion Paper
The Tri-Party Repo Market Like You Have Never Seen It Before
The tri-party repo market is a large and important market where securities dealers find a substantial amount of short-term funding. Despite its importance, this market was very opaque before the crisis. Since March 2010, in accordance with recommendation 13 of the Task Force on Tri-Party Repo Infrastructure Reform report, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has made monthly data on the tri-party repo market available to the public. Today, with our new interactive tool, there is a whole new way to view the market and its evolution. You can make your own charts, looking at volumes for specific ...
Report
COVID Response: The Primary Dealer Credit Facility
The Federal Reserve established a new Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) in March 2020, to allow primary dealers to support smooth market functioning and facilitate the availability of credit to businesses and households, in the face of deteriorating conditions in the market for triparty repo financing due to the coronavirus pandemic. A similar facility had been established in March 2008 to help restore the orderly functioning of the market, following the near-bankruptcy of Bear Stearns, and to prevent the spillover of distress to other financial firms. This paper provides an overview of ...
Discussion Paper
Pricing Liquidity without Preemptive Runs
Prime money market funds (MMFs) are vulnerable to runs. This was dramatically illustrated in September 2008 and March 2020, when massive outflows from prime MMFs worsened stress in the short-term funding markets and eased only after taxpayer-supported interventions by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. In this post, we describe how mechanisms like swing pricing that charge a price for liquidity can reduce the vulnerability of prime MMFs without triggering preemptive runs.
Journal Article
The Market Events of Mid-September 2019
This article studies the mid-September 2019 stress in U.S. money markets: On September 16 and 17, unsecured and secured funding rates spiked, and on September 17, the effective federal funds rate broke the ceiling of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) target range. We highlight two factors that may have contributed to these events. First, reserves may have become scarce for at least some depository institutions, in the sense that these institutions’ reserve holdings may have been close to, or lower than, their desired level. Moreover, frictions in the interbank market may have ...
Report
Rediscounting under aggregate risk with moral hazard
In a 1999 paper, Freeman proposes a model in which discount window lending and open market operations have different outcomes - an important development because in most of the literature the results of these policy tools are indistinguishable. Freeman's conclusion that the central bank should absorb losses related to default to provide risk-sharing goes against the concern that central banks should limit their exposure to credit risk. We extend Freeman's model by introducing moral hazard. With moral hazard, the central bank should avoid absorbing losses, contrary to Freeman's argument. ...
Discussion Paper
Mapping and Sizing the U.S. Repo Market
The U.S. repurchase agreement (repo) market is a large financial market where participants effectively provide collateralized loans to one another. This market played a central role in the recent financial crisis; for example, both Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers experienced problems borrowing in this market in the period leading up to their collapse. Unfortunately, comprehensive and detailed data on this market are not available. Rather, data exist for certain segments of the repo market or for specific firms that operate in this market (see this recent New York Fed staff report). The ...
Report
Payment networks in a search model of money
In a simple search model of money, we study a special kind of memory that gives rise to an arrangement resembling a payment network. Specifically, we assume that agents can pay a cost to access a central database that tracks payments made and received. Incentives must be provided to agents to access the central database and to produce when they participate in this arrangement. We also study policies that can loosen these incentive constraints. In particular, we show that a "no-surcharge" rule has good incentive properties. Finally, we compare our model with that of Cavalcanti and Wallace.
Working Paper
Money Market Fund Vulnerabilities: A Global Perspective
Money market funds (MMFs) are popular around the world, with over $9 trillion in assets under management globally. From their origins in the 1970s, MMFs have operated in a niche between the capital markets and the banking system, as investment funds that offer private money‐like assets with features similar to those of bank deposits. Hence, they are vulnerable to runs that arise from liquidity transformation and from sudden changes in investor perceptions of the funds’ ability to serve as money‐like assets. Since 2000, MMF runs have occurred in many countries and under many regulatory ...