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Report
Dealers and the Dealer of Last Resort: Evidence from the Agency MBS Markets in the COVID-19 Crisis
When market disruptions started in March 2020, dealers maintained the usual liquidity provision in the agency MBS market by taking cash inventory and hedging inventory risk with forward contracts. However, cash and forward prices significantly diverged and began to converge only after the Federal Reserve deployed nonstandard purchase operations to promptly take MBS off dealers’ balance sheets. Further cross-dealer analyses point to supplemental leverage ratio requirements as major constraints on dealers’ balance sheets. Customers’ selling increased when price divergence reverted, ...
Report
How do treasury dealers manage their positions?
Using thirty-one years of data (1990–2020) on U.S. Treasury dealer positions, we find that Treasury issuance is the main driver of dealers’ weekly inventory changes. Such inventory fluctuations are only partially offset in adjacent weeks and not significantly hedged with futures. Dealers are compensated for inventory risk by means of subsequent price appreciation of their holdings. Amid increased balance sheet costs attributable to post-crisis regulatory changes, dealers significantly reduce their position taking and lay off inventory faster. Moreover, the increased participation of ...
Working Paper
What Drives U.S. Treasury Re-use?
We study what drives the re-use of U.S. Treasury securities in the financial system. Using confidential supervisory data, we estimate the degree of collateral re-use at the dealer level through their collateral multiplier : the ratio between a dealer's total secured funding and their outright holdings financed through secured funding. We find that Treasury re-use increases as the supply of available securities decreases, especially when supply declines due to Federal Reserve asset purchases. We also find that non-U.S. dealers' re-use increases when profits from intermediating cash are high, ...