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Newsletter
How vulnerable are insurance companies to a downturn in the municipal bond market?
As the U.S. economy remains weakened by the Covid-19 pandemic, concern persists for the health and resilience of the municipal bond market. Municipal bonds (muni bonds) are debt securities issued by state and local governments to raise money and are generally considered to be safe investments. However, the recent slowdown in economic activity due to Covid-19 created significant stress on state and local government budgets, leading to a heightened risk for municipal bond downgrades and possibly even defaults. In this Chicago Fed Letter, we examine to what extent property and casualty (P&C) and ...
Working Paper
Cyber Vulnerabilities at Large US Financial Institutions and Their Third-Party Service Providers
This paper examines cyber vulnerabilities across the 100 largest US banks, non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs), and their third-party service providers. Our analysis, based on a proprietary cyber risk analytics model, shows NBFIs exhibit greater cyber vulnerabilities than banks, though banks face larger relative losses from routine incidents. We identify third-party service providers as a hidden cyber fault line in the financial system, often having greater vulnerabilities than the institutions they serve and creating systemic risks. Scenario analyses of catastrophic cyber events ...