Search Results
Journal Article
Bank Franchise as a Stabilizing Force
The banking shock of 2023 stemmed from banks’ exposure to interest rate risk by gathering short-term funds to invest in long-term assets. When interest rates rose rapidly during the monetary tightening cycle, banks incurred significant capital losses on their long-term assets, some of which were unrealized on their financial statements. However, bank franchise value—the present value of all future excess profits—which is also unrecognized, could hedge against the losses and provide some stability. Moreover, the potential loss of franchise value could discourage risk-taking, further ...
Working Paper
Do nonfinancial firms use interest rate derivatives to hedge?
We compile and analyze detailed information on the debt structure and interest rate derivative positions of nonfinancial firms in 2000 and 2002. We find that differences in debt structure across firms and time tend to be counterbalanced by difference in derivative positions. In particular, among derivative users, smaller firms tend to have relatively more interest rate exposure from liabilities than larger firms and tend to use derivatives that offset these exposures. Larger firms also tend to limit their interest rate exposures, but they do so through their choice of debt structure rather ...
Working Paper
Measuring Interest Rate Risk in the Life Insurance Sector: The U.S. and the U.K.
We use a two factor model of life insurer stock returns to measure interest rate risk at U.S. and U.K. insurers. Our estimates show that interest rate risk among U.S. life insurers increased as interest rates decreased to historically low levels in recent years. For life insurers in the U.K., in contrast, interest rate risk remained low during this time, roughly unchanged from what it was in the period prior to the financial crisis when long-term interest rates were in their usual historical ranges. We attribute these differences to the heavier use of products that combine guarantees with ...
Journal Article
The Failure of the Bank of the Commonwealth: An Early Example of Interest Rate Risk
This Economic Commentary describes the collapse and subsequent bailout of the Detroit-headquartered Bank of the Commonwealth in 1972. Commonwealth failed because it invested heavily in long-duration, fixed-rate municipal securities in the mid-1960s in a bet that interest rates would decline. Instead, with the beginning of the Great Inflation of 1965–1980, rates rose. Liquidity problems then ensued, and the bank approached failure. Unable to find an acquirer because of Michigan’s banking restrictions, regulators instead bailed out the bank because of fears of contagion. This article also ...
Working Paper
Pricing Tail Risks: Bank Equity Returns During the 2023 Bank Stress
Did bank equity prices reflect growing sector imbalances before the 2023 failure of Silicon Valley Bank? We find that banks with higher reliance on uninsured deposits, or with higher marked-to-market leverage, had lower equity returns prior to SVB's collapse. Although markets priced uninsured deposits and high leverage individually, their interaction was not reflected in market prices prior to SVB’s failure. Post-SVB, banks with less ability to meet outflows without severely depleting capital, and banks with too little useable liquidity relative to runnable funding, experienced larger stock ...
Journal Article
Assessing supervisory scenarios for interest rate risk
A new proposal by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision for setting the amount of capital banks must hold against potential losses from interest rate risk uses only a few, very stylized scenarios. Analysis shows the proposed scenarios are extremely unlikely to occur. While they may be appropriate for setting bank capital guidelines, they are much less relevant for everyday risk management. Instead, using a modeling framework with a plausible range of interest rate scenarios would be more relevant to help banks manage their interest rate risk.
Working Paper
Interest Rate Risk at US Credit Unions
Rising interest rates have prompted concerns about losses on bank assets, especially following the failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in March 2023. In this working paper, we examine whether US credit unions could be subject to similar losses as banks and analyze how their regulatory capital would be affected. We estimate that after realizing losses from assets that have decreased in value and not yet been sold the overall net worth of the credit union industry would have fallen by 40 percent in 2023:Q1. Unrealized losses were most severe at the largest credit unions. Nonetheless, the bulk ...
Discussion Paper
How Do Interest Rates (and Depositors) Impact Measures of Bank Value?
The rapid rise in interest rates across the yield curve has increased the broader public’s interest in the exposure embedded in bank balance sheets and in depositor behavior more generally. In this post, we consider a simple illustration of the potential impact of higher interest rates on measures of bank franchise value.
Working Paper
Monetary Policy and Bank Equity Values in a Time of Low and Negative Interest Rates
Does banks' exposure to interest rate risk change when interest rates are very low or even negative? Using a high-frequency event study methodology and intraday data, we find that the effect of surprise interest rate cuts announced by the ECB on European bank equity values ? an effect that is normally positive ? has become negative since interest rates in the euro area reached zero and below. Since then, a further unexpected cut of 25 basis points in the short-term policy rate lowered banks' stock prices by about 2% on average, compared to a 1% increase in normal times. In the cross section, ...