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Discussion Paper
What’s Up with GCF Repo®?
In a recent Important Notice, the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC) announced that it would no longer support interbank trading for its General Collateral Finance Repo Service. (GCF Repo, hereafter GCF Repo, is a registered service mark of FICC.) But what exactly is the GCF Repo market? And what is interbank GCF Repo specifically? In a series of four posts we take a close look at the GCF Repo market and how it has evolved recently. This first post provides an overview of the GCF Repo market and evaluates its size relative to that of the tri-party repo market as a whole. We also explain ...
Discussion Paper
Have Dealers' Strategies in the GCF Repo® Market Changed?
In a previous post, “Mapping and Sizing the U.S. Repo Market,” our colleagues described the structure of the U.S. repurchase agreement (repo) market. In this post, we consider whether recent regulatory changes have changed the behavior of securities broker-dealers, who play a significant role in repo markets. We focus on the General Collateral Finance (GCF) Repo market, an interdealer market primarily using U.S. Treasury and agency securities as collateral. We find that some dealers use GCF Repo as a substantial source of funding for their inventories, while others primarily use GCF Repo ...
Journal Article
An empirical analysis of the GCF Repo® Service
This article examines how dealers use the GCF Repo service. It begins by explaining the strategies that dealers employ when trading GCF Repo and then uses empirical analysis to quantify the predominance of these strategies. Looking across all dealers and all days, the study finds that on an average day, at least 23 percent of dealers focus on strategies to raise cash and at least 20 percent focus on managing their inventory of securities. This activity involves using GCF Repo to both exclusively source collateral and perform collateral swaps.
Journal Article
The financial plumbing of the GCF Repo® Service
The authors describe the ways that intraday credit was used to facilitate the settlement of trades before reforms to the tri-party repo settlement system. In particular, they focus on two main processes: the end-of-day settlement and the morning unwind. The authors then describe why this extension of intraday credit by the clearing banks is problematic, specifically pointing to concerns that a clearing bank may not be able to absorb the impact of a failing dealer. The authors also discuss various reforms to the tri-party repo settlement process, which, they note, are likely to influence the ...
Discussion Paper
Borrowing, Lending, and Swapping Collateral in GCF Repo®
In the third post in this series, we examined GCF Repo traders? end-of-day strategies. In this final post, we further our understanding of dealers? behavior by looking at their trading pattern within the day.
Discussion Paper
Understanding the Interbank GCF Repo® Market
In this post, we provide a different perspective on the General Collateral Finance (GCF) Repo market. Instead of looking at the market as a whole, as we did in our previous post , or breaking it down by type of dealer, as we did in this primer, we disaggregate interbank activity by clearing bank and by collateral class. This perspective highlights the most traded collateral and the extent to which dealers at a clearing bank are net borrowers or net lenders. This view of the market is informative given the proposed changes announced recently by the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation.
Report
A primer on the GCF Repo® Service
This primer provides a detailed description of the GCF Repo Service, a financial service provided by the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation. The primer is composed of an introductory note and two separate papers. {{p}} The first paper focuses on the clearance and settlement of GCF Repo. These financial plumbing details are especially important because the settlement of GCF Repo has been and will continue to be impacted by the current reforms to the tri-party repo settlement platform. In particular, the authors lay out the various ways that intraday credit was used pre-reform to facilitate the ...
Discussion Paper
Why Dealers Trade in GCF Repo®
In this post, the third in a series on GCF Repo, we describe dealers? trading strategies. We show that most dealers exhibit highly regular strategies, using the GCF Repo service either to borrow or to lend, on net, on almost all the days in which they are active. Moreover, dealers? strategies are highly persistent over time: Dealers that use GCF Repo to borrow (or to lend) in a given quarter are highly likely to continue to do so in the following quarter. Understanding how dealers trade in the GCF Repo market may provide insight about the role of the repo market more generally and about how ...
Journal Article
Introduction [to A Primer on the GCF Repo® Service]
Repurchase agreements, or repos, are commonly used by financial entities to access money markets. GCF Repo, a financial service provided by the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC), is a particular type of repo in which trades are executed anonymously, with FICC acting as a central counterparty and guaranteeing settlement. In this primer, which consists of an introduction and two articles, the authors explore the effects on GCF Repo of ongoing reforms to the settlement procedures for another type of repo, tri-party repo. Key areas of focus are the impact of the reforms on the use of ...