Search Results
Working Paper
The Evolution of the Federal Reserve Swap Lines since 1962
In this paper, we describe the evolution of the Federal Reserve?s swap lines from their inception in 1962 as a mechanism to forestall claims on US gold reserves under Bretton Woods to their use during the Great Recession as a means of extending emergency dollar liquidity. We describe the Federal Reserve?s successes and failures. We argue that swaps calm crisis situations by both supplementing foreign countries? dollar reserves and by signaling central-bank cooperation. We show how swaps exposed the Federal Reserve to conditionality and raised fears that they bypassed the Congressional ...
The Speed of Discount Window Lending: A Look Back at 1985
The 1985 thrift crises in Ohio and Maryland show how the Fed, as a lender of last resort, took proactive steps to enhance the effectiveness of its discount window.
Discussion Paper
The Recent Rise in Discount Window Borrowing
The Federal Reserve’s primary credit program—offered through its “discount window” (DW)—provides temporary short-term funding to fundamentally sound banks. Historically, loan activity has been low during normal times due to a variety of factors, including the DW’s status as a back-up source of liquidity with a relatively punitive interest rate, the stigma attached to DW borrowing from the central bank, and, since 2008, elevated levels of reserves in the banking system. However, beginning in 2022, DW borrowing under the primary credit program increased notably in comparison to past ...
Discussion Paper
Which Dealers Borrowed from the Fed’s Lender-of-Last-Resort Facilities?
During the 2007-08 financial crisis, the Fed established lending facilities designed to improve market functioning by providing liquidity to nondepository financial institutions—the first lending targeted to this group since the 1930s. What was the financial condition of the dealers that borrowed from these facilities? Were they healthy institutions behaving opportunistically or were they genuinely distressed? In published research, we find that dealers in a weaker financial condition were more likely to participate than healthier ones and tended to borrow more. Our findings reinforce the ...
Discussion Paper
Can Discount Window Stigma Be Cured?
One of the core responsibilities of central banks is to act as “lender of last resort” to the financial system. In the U.S., the Federal Reserve has been operating as a lender of last resort through its “discount window” (DW) for more than a century. Historically, however, the DW has been plagued by stigma—banks’ reluctance to use the DW, even for benign reasons, out of concerns that it could be interpreted as a sign of financial weakness. In this post, we report on new research showing that once a DW facility is stigmatized, removing that stigma is difficult.
Working Paper
Crisis Liquidity Facilities with Nonbank Counterparties: Lessons from the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility
In response to immense strains in the asset-backed securities market in 2008 and 2020, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury twice launched the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF). TALF was an unusual crisis facility because it provided loans to a wide range of nonbank financial institutions. Using detailed loan-level data unexplored by previous researchers, we study the behavior of nonbank borrowers in TALF. We find the extent to which the actions of these borrowers supported key program goals--stabilizing markets quickly, winding down the program when it was no longer ...
Working Paper
Liquidity from Two Lending Facilities
During financial crises, the lender of last resort (LOLR) uses lending facilities to inject critical funding into the banking sector. The facilities need to be designed in such a way that banks are not reluctant to seek assistance due to stigma and that banks with liquidity concerns are attracted rather than those prone to risk-taking and moral hazard incentives. We use an unexpected disclosure that introduced stigma at one of two similar LOLRs during the Great Depression to evaluate whether banks used LOLR assistance to improve their liquidity needs using a novel trivariate model with ...
Working Paper
The Effect of Central Bank Liquidity Injections on Bank Credit Supply
We study the effectiveness of central bank liquidity injections in restoring bank credit supply following a wholesale funding dry-up. We combine borrower-level data from the Italian credit registry with bank security-level holdings and analyze the transmission of the European Central Bank three-year Long Term Refinancing Operation. Exploiting a regulatory change that expands eligible collateral, we show that banks more affected by the dry-up use this facility to restore their credit supply, while less affected banks use it to increase their holdings of high-yield government bonds. Unable to ...
Working Paper
The (Unintended?) Consequences of the Largest Liquidity Injection Ever
The design of lender-of-last-resort interventions can exacerbate the bank-sovereign nexus. During sovereign crises, central bank provision of long-term liquidity incentivizes banks to purchase high yield eligible collateral securities matching the maturity of the central bank loans. Using unique security level data, we find that the European Central Bank's 3-year Long-Term Refinancing Operation caused Portuguese banks to purchase short-term domestic government bonds, equivalent to 10.6% of amounts outstanding, and pledge them to obtain central bank liquidity. The steepening of Eurozone ...
Working Paper
Balancing Before and After: Treasury Market Reform Proposals and the Connections Between Ex-Ante and Ex-Post Liquidity Tools
This paper develops a simple framework that helps to draw out some of the potential connections between ex-ante liquidity risk management tools such as liquidity requirements or mandatory fees and ex-post liquidity tools such as a lender of last resort. A central message of this analysis is that policy actions that expand the lender of last resort function so as to better address periods of financial distress are likely to be most effective when accompanied by regulations or other mechanisms that encourage socially-responsible ex-ante liquidity risk management on the part of financial firms. ...