Search Results
Discussion Paper
Regulatory Incentives and Quarter-End Dynamics in the Repo Market
Since the global financial crisis, central bankers and other prudential authorities have been working to design and implement new banking regulations, known as Basel III, to reduce risk in the financial sector. Although most features of the Basel III regime are implemented consistently across jurisdictions, some important details vary. In particular, banks headquartered in the euro area, Switzerland, and Japan report their leverage ratios?essentially, capital divided by total consolidated assets?as a snapshot of their value on the last day of the quarter. In contrast, institutions ...
Working Paper
Are Repo Markets Fragile? Evidence from September 2019
We show that the segmented structure of the U.S. Treasury repo market, in which some participants have limited access across the segments, leads to rate dispersion, even in this essentially riskless market. Using confidential data on repo trading, we demonstrate how the rate dispersion between the centrally cleared and over-the-counter (OTC) segments of the Treasury repo market was exacerbated during the stress episode of September 2019. Our results highlight that, while segmentation can increase fragility in the repo market, the presence of strong trading relationships in the OTC segment ...
Working Paper
Rewiring repo
We develop a model of the repo market with strategic interactions among dealers who compete for funding in a decentralized over-the-counter market and have access to a centrally cleared interdealer market. We show that such “wiring” of the repo market combined with imperfect competition in dealer funding results in market inefficiencies and instability. The model allows us to disentangle supply and demand factors, and we use these factors to estimate supply and demand elasticities. Our estimates suggest that the instability of the market in September 2019 was driven by a large supply ...