Search Results
Journal Article
The Market Events of Mid-September 2019
This article studies the mid-September 2019 stress in U.S. money markets: On September 16 and 17, unsecured and secured funding rates spiked, and on September 17, the effective federal funds rate broke the ceiling of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) target range. We highlight two factors that may have contributed to these events. First, reserves may have become scarce for at least some depository institutions, in the sense that these institutions’ reserve holdings may have been close to, or lower than, their desired level. Moreover, frictions in the interbank market may have ...
Journal Article
Challenges in identifying interbank loans
Although interbank lending markets play a key role in the financial system, the lack of disaggregated data often makes the analysis of these markets difficult. To address this problem, recent academic papers focusing on unsecured loans of central bank reserves have employed an algorithm in an effort to identify individual transactions that are federal funds loans. The accuracy of the algorithm, however, is not known. The authors of this study conduct a formal test with U.S. data and find that the rate of false positives produced by one of these algorithms is on average 81 percent; the rate of ...
Report
A model of the federal funds market: yesterday, today, and tomorrow
The landscape of the federal funds market changed drastically in the wake of the Great Recession as large-scale asset purchase programs left depository institutions awash with reserves and new regulations made it more costly for these institutions to lend. As traditional levers for implementing monetary policy became less effective, the Federal Reserve introduced new tools to implement the target range for the federal funds rate, changing this landscape even more. In this paper, we develop a model that is capable of reproducing the main features of the federal funds market, as observed before ...
Working Paper
A Sequential Bargaining Model of the Fed Funds Market with Excess Reserves
We model bargaining between non-bank investors and heterogeneous bank borrowers in the federal funds market. The analysis highlights how the federal funds rate will respond to movements in other money market interest rates in an environment with elevated levels of excess reserves. The model predicts that the administered rate offered through the Federal Reserve's overnight reverse repurchase agreement facility influences the fed funds rate even when the facility is not used. Changes in repo rates pass through to the federal funds rate, but by less than one-for-one. We calibrate the model to ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy Implementation with Ample Reserves
We offer a parsimonious model of the reserve demand to study the tradeoffs associated with various monetary policy implementation frameworks. Prior to the 2007–09 financial crisis, many central banks supplied scarce reserves to execute their interest-rate policies. In response to the crisis, central banks undertook quantitative-easing policies that greatly expanded their balance sheets and, by extension, the amount of reserves they supplied. When the crisis and its aftereffects passed, central banks were in a position to choose a framework that has reserves that are (1) abundant—by ...
Working Paper
An Empirical Study of Trade Dynamics in the Fed Funds Market
We use minute-by-minute daily transaction-level payments data to document the cross-sectional and time-series behavior of the estimated prices and quantities negotiated by commercial banks in the fed funds market. We study the frequency and volume of trade, the size distribution of loans, the distribution of bilateral fed funds rates, and the intraday dynamics of the reserve balances held by commercial banks. We find evidence of the importance of the liquidity provision achieved by commercial banks that act as de facto intermediaries of fed funds.
Speech
Balance Sheet Normalization: Monitoring Reserve Conditions and Understanding Repo Market Pressures
Remarks at 2024 U.S. Treasury Market Conference, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City.
Working Paper
Reserve Balances, the Federal Funds Market and Arbitrage in the New Regulatory Framework
We study developments in reserve balances and the federal funds market in the context of two banking regulatory changes: the widening of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) assessment base and the introduction of the Basel III leverage ratio. Using a novel data set that includes FDIC fees and balance sheet data for depository institutions, we find that, as most foreign banks were not subject to the FDIC fee, they absorbed increasing amounts of reserve balances. Furthermore, foreign banks experienced positive and improving conditions for arbitraging between borrowing reserve ...