Search Results
Working Paper
Runs and Flights to Safety: Are Stablecoins the New Money Market Funds?
Similar to the more traditional money market funds (MMFs), stablecoins aim to provide investors with safe, money-like assets. We investigate similarities and differences between these two investment products. Like MMFs, stablecoins suffer from “flight-to-safety” dynamics: we document net flows from riskier to safer stablecoins on days of crypto-market stress and estimate a discrete “break-the-buck” threshold of $1, below which stablecoin redemptions accelerate. We then focus on two specific stablecoin runs, in 2022 and 2023, showing that the same flight-to-safety dynamics also ...
Speech
Welcoming Remarks “Conference on the Financial Stability Implications of Stablecoins”
Susan Collins offered welcoming remarks for the virtual gathering that brought together researchers, regulators, and industry practitioners to discuss the potential impact of stablecoins on the broader financial system.
Working Paper
Runs and Flights to Safety: Are Stablecoins the New Money Market Funds?
Stablecoins and money market funds both seek to provide investors with safe, money-like assets but are vulnerable to runs in times of stress. In this paper, we investigate similarities and differences between the two, comparing investor behavior during the stablecoin runs of 2022 and 2023 to investor behavior during the money market fund runs of 2008 and 2020. We document that, similar to money market fund investors, stablecoin investors engage in flight-to-safety, with net flows from riskier to safer stablecoins during run periods. However, whereas in money market funds run risk has ...
Report
How Bad Are Weather Disasters for Banks?
Not very. We find that weather disasters over the last quarter century had insignificant or small effects on U.S. banks’ performance. This stability seems endogenous rather than a mere reflection of federal aid. Disasters increase loan demand, which offsets losses and actually boosts profits at larger banks. Local banks tend to avoid mortgage lending where floods are more common than official flood maps would predict, suggesting that local knowledge may also mitigate disaster impacts.