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Report
Federal Reserve tools for managing rates and reserves
The Federal Reserve announced in January 2019 that it would maintain an ample supply of reserves amid its balance sheet reduction. We model the impact of reserves on banks’ liquidity and balance sheet costs. In competitive general equilibrium, the optimal supply of reserves equates bank deposit rates to the interest rate paid on excess reserves (IOER), consistent with ample reserves. Raising the Fed’s overnight reverse repo rate up to IOER would increase liquidity, expediently reduce the overabundance of reserves, and stabilize the volatility of overnight market rates. Empirical analysis ...
Working Paper
Can the U.S. Interbank Market Be Revived?
Large-scale asset purchases by the Federal Reserve as well as new Basel III banking regulations have led to important changes in U.S. money markets. Most notably, the interbank market has essentially disappeared with the dramatic increase in excess reserves held by banks. We build a model in the tradition of Poole (1968) to study whether interbank market activity can be revived if the supply of excess reserves is decreased sufficiently. We show that it may not be possible to revive the market to precrisis volumes due to costs associated with recent banking regulations. Although the volume of ...