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Report
When It Rains, It Pours: Cyber Risk and Financial Conditions
We analyze how systemic cyber risk relates to the financial cycle and show that the potential impact of a cyber attack is systematically greater during stressed financial conditions. This is true over the past two decades and particularly at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when changes in payment activity increased vulnerability by approximately 50 percent relative to the rest of 2020 through more concentration and intraday liquidity stress. We evaluate the effectiveness of policy interventions used to stabilize markets at mitigating cyber vulnerability. We argue that cyber and other ...
Report
Cyber Risk and the U.S. Financial System: A Pre-Mortem Analysis
We model how a cyber attack may be amplified through the U.S. financial system, focusing on the wholesale payments network. We estimate that the impairment of any of the five most active U.S. banks will result in significant spillovers to other banks, with 38 percent of the network affected on average. The impact varies and can be larger on particular days and geographies. When banks respond to uncertainty by liquidity hoarding, the potential impact in forgone payment activity is dramatic, reaching more than 2.5 times daily GDP. In a reverse stress test, interruptions originating from banks ...