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Discussion Paper
Investigating the Proposed Overnight Treasury GC Repo Benchmark Rates
In its recent ?Statement Regarding the Publication of Overnight Treasury GC Repo Rates,? the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in cooperation with the U.S. Treasury Department?s Office of Financial Research, announced the potential publication of three overnight Treasury general collateral (GC) repurchase (repo) benchmark rates. Each of the proposed rates is designed to capture a particular segment of repo market activity. All three rates, as currently envisioned, would initially be based on transaction-level overnight GC repo trades occurring on tri-party repo platforms. The first rate would ...
Report
Repo and the Liquidity Risk Premium
Securities dealers play a central role intermediating funds in the U.S. short-term money markets. This intermediation involves risk, which can be mitigated by holding buffers of liquid securities. The cost of holding these buffers—the liquidity risk premium—is driven by the opportunity cost of holding money and so is influenced by monetary policy. We use detailed data on the pricing of repurchase agreements (repo), the main contract used to provide secured funding in the money markets, to measure by how much changes in monetary policy affect the liquidity risk premium embedded in repo ...
Report
Overnight RRP operations as a monetary policy tool: some design considerations
We review recent changes in monetary policy that have led to development and testing of an overnight reverse repurchase agreement (ON RRP) facility, an innovative tool for implementing monetary policy during the normalization process. Making ON RRPs available to a broad set of investors, including nonbank institutions that are significant lenders in money markets, could complement the use of the interest on excess reserves (IOER) and help control short-term interest rates. We examine some potentially important secondary effects of an ON RRP facility, both positive and negative, including ...
Report
Reference guide to U.S. repo and securities lending markets
This paper is intended to serve as a reference guide on U.S. repo and securities lending markets. It begins by presenting the institutional structure, and then describes the market landscape, the role of the participants, and other characteristics, including how repo and securities lending activity has changed since the 2007-09 financial crisis. The paper then discusses vulnerabilities in the repo and short-term wholesale funding markets and the efforts to limit potential systemic risks. It next provides an overview of existing data sources on securities financing markets and highlights ...
Working Paper
Overnight RRP Operations as a Monetary Policy Tool: Some Design Considerations
We review recent changes in monetary policy that have led to development and testing of an overnight reverse repurchase agreement (ON RRP) facility, an innovative tool for implementing monetary policy during the normalization process. Making ON RRPs available to a broad set of investors, including nonbank institutions that are significant lenders in money markets, could complement the use of the interest on excess reserves (IOER) and help control short-term interest rates. We examine some potentially important secondary effects of an ON RRP facility, both positive and negative, including ...
Journal Article
The Fed’s Central Bank Swap Lines and FIMA Repo Facility
Building on the facility design and application experience from the global financial crisis, in March 2020 the Federal Reserve eased the terms on its standing swap lines in collaboration with other central banks, reactivated temporary swap agreements, and introduced the new Foreign and International Monetary Authorities (FIMA) Repo Facility. While these facilities have similarities, they differ in their operations, breadth of counterparties, and range of potential effects. This article provides key details on these facilities and highlights evidence that they can reduce strains in global ...
Report
The use of collateral in bilateral repurchase and securities lending agreements
We use unique data from U.S. bank holding company-affiliated securities dealers to study the use of collateral in bilateral repurchase and securities lending agreements. Market participants? use of collateral differs substantially across asset classes: for U.S. Treasury securities transactions, we find that haircuts are large enough to provide full protection from default, whereas the same is not usually true for equities transactions. Further, although most of the equities in our sample are each associated with a unique haircut, most of the U.S. Treasury securities are each associated with ...
Report
COVID Response: The Fed’s Central Bank Swap Lines and FIMA Repo Facility
Building on the facility design and application experience from the period of the global financial crisis, in March 2020 the Federal Reserve eased the terms on its standing swap lines in collaboration with other central banks, reactivated temporary swap agreements, and then introduced the new Foreign and International Monetary Authorities (FIMA) repo facility. While these facilities share similarities, they are different in their operations, breadth of counterparties and potential span of effects. This article provides key details on these facilities and evidence that the central bank swap ...
Discussion Paper
Are New Repo Participants Gaining Ground?
Following the 2007-09 financial crisis, regulations were introduced that increased the cost of entering into repurchase agreements (repo) for bank holding companies (BHC). As a consequence, banks and securities dealers associated with BHCs, a set of firms which dominates the repo market, were predicted to pull back from the market. In this blog post, we examine whether this changed environment allowed new participants, particularly those not subject to the new regulations, to emerge. We find that although new participants have come on the scene and made gains, they remain a small part of the ...
Domestic banks are inelastic providers of marginal funding to repo markets
As system liquidity declines and rates of return rise, new types of participants enter repo markets as lenders, although some may not be able to reliably deploy cash in the early morning when markets are most active. The short tenor and early-morning timing of most private market repo transactions make domestic banks especially inelastic lenders in response to unanticipated demands for lending