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Discussion Paper
On Fire-Sale Externalities, TARP Was Close to Optimal
Imagine that many large and levered banks suffer heavy losses and must quickly sell assets to reduce their leverage. We expect the market price of the assets sold to decline, at least temporarily. As a result, any other financial institutions that happen to hold the same assets will experience balance sheet losses through no fault of their own —a negative fire-sale externality. In this post, we show that the vulnerability to fire-sale externalities was high during the crisis and that the capital injections of the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) helped reduce it ...
Report
Cournot Fire Sales
In standard Walrasian macro-finance models, pecuniary externalities due to fire sales lead to excessive borrowing and insufficient liquidity holdings. We investigate whether imperfect competition (Cournot) improves welfare through internalizing the externality and find that this is far from guaranteed. Cournot competition can overcorrect the inefficiently high borrowing in a standard model of levered real investment. In contrast, Cournot competition can exacerbate the inefficiently low liquidity in a standard model of financial portfolio choice. Implications for welfare and regulation are ...
Discussion Paper
Magnifying the Risk of Fire Sales in the Tri-Party Repo Market
The fragility inherent in the tri-party repo market came to light during the 2008-09 financial crisis. One of the main vulnerabilities is the risk of fire sales, which can be enhanced by the response of some investors to stress events. Money market mutual funds (MMFs) and the agents investing cash collateral obtained from securities lending (SLs) are thought to behave, in times of stress, in ways that exacerbate fire-sale risks in the tri-party repo market. Based on detailed investor data, we find that MMFs and SLs constitute almost half of the investor market, making it crucial for tri-party ...
Discussion Paper
Banking System Vulnerability: 2022 Update
To assess the vulnerability of the U.S. financial system, it is important to monitor leverage and funding risks—both individually and in tandem. In this post, we provide an update of four analytical models aimed at capturing different aspects of banking system vulnerability with data through 2022:Q2, assessing how these vulnerabilities have changed since last year. The four models were introduced in a Liberty Street Economics post in 2018 and have been updated annually since then.
Working Paper
Information Externalities, Funding Liquidity, and Fire Sales
We develop a theory of learning in a model of fire sales and collateralized debt to study how beliefs about fundamentals are shaped by market conditions. Agents exchange short-term debt contracts to invest in a long-term risky asset, and receive shocks to the opportunity cost of funds (cost shocks) and news about the fundamental of the asset, both of which are private information. Asset prices play a dual role of clearing markets and conveying agents' private information, but markets are informationally inefficient: Agents can partially, but never fully, infer their counterparties' private ...
Discussion Paper
Parting Reflections on the Series on Large and Complex Banks
The motivation for the Economic Policy Review series was to understand better the behavior of large and complex banks, and we have covered a lot of ground toward that end. We have examined large banks? economies of scale, their proclivity toward risk taking, their possible funding advantages (pre-Dodd Frank), the sources and types of their complexity, and the sources and means of dealer bank financing. We have also looked at resolution issues surrounding large and complex banks, including a case study on the Lehman bankruptcy, a review of resolution methods, and two studies of the rationale ...
Report
Non-Bank Financial Institutions and Banks’ Fire-Sale Vulnerabilities
Banks carry significant exposures to nonbanks from direct dealings, but they can also be exposed, indirectly, through losses in asset values resulting from fire-sale events. We assess the vulnerability of U.S. banks to fire sales potentially originating from any of twelve separate nonbank segments and identify network-like externalities driven by the interconnectedness across nonbank types in terms of asset holdings. We document that such network externalities can contribute to very large multiples of an original fire sale, thus suggesting that conventional assessments of fire-sale ...
Working Paper
Financial Fire Sales: Evidence from Bank Failures
Theory suggests the reduction in financing capacity after the failure of a financial intermediary can reduce the value of financial assets. Forced sales of the intermediary's assets could consume liquidity, depressing the liquidation value of the assets of healthy intermediaries and causing contagious runs. These financial fire sales can both cause, and exacerbate, real fire sales, the focus of previous studies. This paper investigates the relevance of financial fire sales using new datasets covering bank failures during the farm depression in the United States just before the Great ...
Discussion Paper
Banking System Vulnerability: 2023 Update
The bank failures that occurred in March 2023 highlighted how unrealized losses on securities can make banks vulnerable to a sudden loss of funding. This risk, which materialized following the rapid rise in interest rates that began in early 2022, underscores the importance of monitoring the vulnerabilities of the banking system. In this post, as in previous years, we provide an update of four analytical models aimed at capturing different aspects of vulnerability of the U.S. banking system, with data through the second quarter of 2023. In addition, we discuss changes made to the methodology ...