Search Results
Journal Article
Measuring Market-Based Inflation Expectations
TIPS offer a hedge against inflation risks, so demand for these securities may be up because investors are worried about longer-run inflation.
Working Paper
Monetary Transmission through Bank Securities Portfolios
We study the transmission of monetary policy through bank securities portfolios using granular supervisory data on U.S. bank securities, hedging positions, and corporate credit. Banks that experienced larger losses on their securities during the 2022-2023 monetary tightening cycle extended less credit to firms. This spillover effect was stronger for available-for-sale securities, unhedged securities, and banks that must include unrealized gains and losses in their regulatory capital. A structural model, disciplined by our cross-sectional regression estimates, shows that interest rate ...
Working Paper
The Scarcity Value of Treasury Collateral: Repo Market Effects of Security-Specific Supply and Demand Factors
In the repo market, forward agreements are security-specific (i.e., there are no deliverable substitutes), which makes it an ideal place to measure the value of fluctuations in a security's available supply. In this study, we quantify the scarcity value of Treasury collateral by estimating the impact of security-specific demand and supply factors on the repo rates of all the outstanding U.S. Treasury securities. Our results indicate the existence of an economically and statistically significant scarcity premium, especially for shorter-term securities. The estimated scarcity effect is quite ...
Working Paper
Underwater: Strategic Trading and Risk Management in Bank Securities Portfolios
We use bond-level data to study how US banks manage risk in their securities portfolios, focusing on the period of rapidly-rising interest rates in 2022-23, and examine the role of financial and regulatory frictions in shaping bank behavior. Interest rate risk in bank portfolios increased sharply as rates rose, with significant cross-bank heterogeneity depending on ex ante holdings of bonds with embedded options. In response, exposed banks shortened the duration of bond purchases but did not actively sell risky securities or expand “qualified” hedging activity; securities also played a ...
Speech
Rising to the Challenge: Central Banking, Financial Markets, and the Pandemic
Remarks at the 16th Meeting of the Financial Research Advisory Committee for the Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (delivered via videoconference).
Discussion Paper
What Happens When Regulatory Capital Is Marked to Market?
Minimum equity capital requirements are a key part of bank regulation. But there is little agreement about the right way to measure regulatory capital. One of the key debates is the extent to which capital ratios should be based on current market values rather than historical ?accrual? values of assets and liabilities. In a new research paper, we investigate the effects of a recent regulatory change that ties regulatory capital directly to the market value of the securities portfolio for some banks.
Report
Regulation and risk shuffling in bank securities portfolios
Bank capital requirements are based on a mix of market values and book values. We investigate the effects of a policy change that ties regulatory capital to the market value of the ?available-for-sale" investment securities portfolio for some banking organizations. Our analysis is based on security-level data on individual bank portfolios matched to bond characteristics. We find little clear evidence that banks respond by reducing the riskiness of their securities portfolios, although there is some evidence of a greater use of derivatives to hedge securities exposures. Instead, banks respond ...
Discussion Paper
Available for Sale? Understanding Bank Securities Portfolios
It’s natural to think of banks as intermediaries that take in deposits and use them to make loans to businesses and individuals. But in fact, loans make up only 45 percent of the assets of U.S. banking organizations. What’s the rest? A large chunk, representing 24 percent of total assets, is accounted for by securities, such as U.S. Treasury and foreign government bonds, mortgage-backed securities (MBS), municipal and corporate bonds, and equities. In this post, we take a tour of bank securities portfolios, making use of charts and statistics from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s ...
Journal Article
What We Learn from a Sovereign Debt Restructuring in France in 1721
A debt is a promise to perform a certain action (make a payment) in the future. A default is a failure to perform the action when the time comes to do so. If performance of the action were always in my interest, the promise to perform it would be superfluous. When we promise to do something, it is precisely because we may well not want to do it. Debt usually takes the form of a contract, which courts can enforce. But sovereign debt (debt issued by governments) is harder to enforce, because governments aren?t easily constrained by courts. How can sovereign governments make promises and be ...
Speech
Treasury Market Liquidity and Early Lessons from the Pandemic Shock
Remarks at Brookings-Chicago Booth Task Force on Financial Stability (TFFS) meeting, panel on market liquidity (delivered via videoconference).