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A Look at the Fed’s Emergency Lending Programs
The Federal Reserve launched an alphabet soup of programs in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Journal Article
Small Business Lending and the Paycheck Protection Program
The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the PPP Liquidity Facility were launched early in the pandemic to help many small businesses survive. These programs encouraged banks to lend more extensively to small businesses over the first half of 2020. Since then, however, banks have reduced their exposure to these loans, leaving no significant changes in small business lending associated with participation in these programs over the three-year period from 2020 through 2022. This raises some doubt that emergency lending programs encourage long-term relationships that outlast the programs.
Journal Article
Central Banks, Global Shocks, and Local Crises: Lessons from the Atlanta Fed's Response to the 1920–21 Recession
During late 1920, the president (then called "governor") and board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta were confronted with an unexpected, devastating collapse in the price of a commodity whose global production was concentrated in their district—cotton. Their judgment was that the fall in cotton prices was temporary and that its effects could be lessened with generous credit policies that did not conflict with the Federal Reserve Act. Other officials within the Federal Reserve System did not agree with this judgment, however, leading to a contentious policy debate and an ...
Discussion Paper
Central Banks, Global Shocks, and Local Crises: Lessons from the Atlanta Fed's Response to the 1920–21 Recession
During late 1920, the president (then called "governor") and board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta were confronted with an unexpected, devastating collapse in the price of a commodity whose global production was concentrated in their district—cotton. Their judgment was that the fall in cotton prices was temporary and that its effects could be lessened with generous credit policies that did not conflict with the Federal Reserve Act. Other officials within the Federal Reserve System did not agree with this judgment, however, leading to a contentious policy debate and an ...
Discussion Paper
Reading the Panic: How Investors Perceived Bank Risk During the 2023 Bank Run
The bank run that started in March 2023 in the U.S. occurred at an unusually rapid pace, suggesting that depositors were surprised by these events. Given that public data revealed bank vulnerabilities as early as 2022:Q1, were other market participants also surprised? In this post, based on a recent paper, we develop a new, high-frequency measure of bank balance sheet risk to examine how stock market investors’ risk sensitivity evolved around the run. We find that stock market investors only became attentive to bank risk after the run and only to the risk of a limited number (less than ...
Discussion Paper
Calming the Panic: Investor Risk Perceptions and the Fed’s Emergency Lending during the 2023 Bank Run
In a companion post, we showed that during the bank run of spring 2023 investors were seemingly not concerned about bank risk broadly but rather became sensitized to the risk of only about a third of all publicly traded banks. In this post, we investigate how the Federal Reserve’s liquidity support affected investor risk perceptions during the run. We find that the announcement of the Fed’s novel Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP), and subsequent borrowings from the program, substantially reduced investor risk perceptions. However, borrowings from the Fed’s traditional discount window ...