Search Results
Briefing
Bank Lending in the Time of COVID
We discuss the evolution of bank lending during the first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Large domestic banks and foreign-related banks increased significantly their lending to businesses during these months, much of it through existing lines of credit. Small domestic banks played an active role in providing paycheck protection loans. In terms of consumer credit, the stock of banks' residential mortgage loans did not change substantially, and the amount of bank credit flowing directly to consumers decreased.
Working Paper
Evaluating Local Language Models: An Application to Bank Earnings Calls
This study evaluates the performance of local large language models (LLMs) in interpreting financial texts, compared with closed-source, cloud-based models. We first introduce new benchmarking tasks for assessing LLM performance in analyzing financial and economic texts and explore the refinements needed to improve its performance. Our benchmarking results suggest local LLMs are a viable tool for general natural language processing analysis of these texts. We then leverage local LLMs to analyze the tone and substance of bank earnings calls in the post-pandemic era, including calls conducted ...
Journal Article
Do we know what we owe? Consumer debt as reported by borrowers and lenders
Household surveys are the source of some of the most widely studied data on consumer balance sheets, with the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) generally cited as the leading source of wealth data for the United States. At the same time, recent research questions survey respondents? propensity and ability to report debt characteristics accurately. This study compares household debt as reported by borrowers to the SCF with household debt as reported by lenders to Equifax using the new FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel (CCP). The borrower and lender debt distributions are compared by year, age of ...
Journal Article
Rapid Declines in the Fed’s Overnight Reverse Repurchase (ON RRP) Facility May Start to Slow
The value of assets held at the Federal Reserve’s overnight reverse repurchase (ON RRP) facility has dropped by close to 60 percent from its peak in December 2022. Much of this drop is attributed to an increase in Treasury bill issuance to refill the Treasury General Account (TGA) after the most recent debt-limit debate. However, the TGA is not expected to grow much more, suggesting the rapid decline in assets held at the ON RRP could slow.
Briefing
What Are Stablecoins Used for Today? Estimating the Distribution of Stablecoins
Uncovering where stablecoins are held and how they are used in the financial ecosystem provides three key insights: stablecoins are rarely used for payments, stablecoin infrastructure lacks interoperability, and the stablecoin ecosystem is still predominantly tied to crypto finance.
Working Paper
Financing Modes and Lender Monitoring
Shadow banks are widely believed to be a creation of financial regulation and regulatory arbitrage. We show that bank and nonbank modes of financing can emerge endogenously in a simple borrower-lender framework absent regulatory arbitrage or policy interventions. The coexistence of banks and shadow banks in the absence of regulatory intervention speaks to the importance of shadow banks as alternative modes of financial intermediation. We explore the scope of regulation in determining the size and location of shadow banking, as opposed to how regulation can be designed to curtail shadow bank ...
Briefing
Who Borrows From the Discount Window in "Normal" Times?
New rules mandate the release of transaction-level data on loans at the Federal Reserve's discount window. This higher level of transparency has created an opportunity to learn more about the role of the discount window outside of crisis periods. These data show that larger and less liquid banks use the discount window more actively and that holdings of bank reserves are negatively correlated with discount window borrowing. Access to the discount window affects bank portfolio decisions, in particular holdings of reserves, in subtle ways.
Accounting for interest rate risk: Matching Fed assets to liabilities
The Fed has floating-rate liabilities as well as long-lived, zero-interest liabilities. A barbell of floating-rate and long-duration assets would best offset the interest rate risk from these liabilities. Investing in a more diversified mix of durations, while matching the average duration of assets, could be more practical than the barbell approach but would leave a substantial portion of interest rate risk unhedged.