Search Results
Working Paper
The Life Insurance Industry and Systemic Risk: A Bond Market Perspective
The 2008 financial crisis brought a focus on the potential for a large insurance firm to contribute to systemic risk. Among the concerns raised was that a negative shock to insurers could lead to a ?fire sale? of corporate bonds, a market where insurers are among the largest participants. This paper discusses the existing evidence on life insurance firms and systemic risk, with a focus on the investment grade corporate bond market. We provide some tentative evidence that life insurers tend to absorb liquidity risk by purchasing bonds when the bonds are less liquid than average. However, we do ...
Speech
Foreign Exchange Market Structure: The Land of a Thousand Lakes
Remarks at FX Market Structure Conference, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City.
Discussion Paper
How Liquid Is the Inflation Swap Market?
Inflation swaps are used to transfer inflation risk and make inferences about the future course of inflation. Despite the importance of this market to inflation hedgers, inflation speculators, and policymakers, there is little evidence on its liquidity. Based on an analysis of new and detailed data in this post we show that the market appears reasonably liquid and transparent despite low trading activity, likely reflecting the high liquidity of related markets for inflation risk. In a previous post, we examined similar issues for the broader interest rate derivatives market.
Discussion Paper
Leader-Follower Dynamics in Shareholder Activism
Activist shareholders play a central role in modern corporations, influencing the capital structure, business strategy, and governance of firms. Such “blockholders” range from investors who actively jawbone or break up firms to index funds that are largely passive in that they limit themselves to voting. In between, however, is a key group of blockholders that have historically focused on trading but have embraced activism as an established business strategy in the past few decades. Campaigns involving such “trading” blockholders have become ubiquitous, increasingly targeting ...
Report
Liquidity and Trading Dynamics in the Off-the-Run U.S. Treasury Market
In this article, we study trading activity and liquidity of off-the-run U.S. Treasury securities. Off-the-run Treasuries are seasoned securities, account for about 98 percent of all Treasuries outstanding, and played a central role in the pandemic-fueled dash-for-cash in March 2020. Understanding these securities better can improve thinking around how market resilience might be improved. We document and discuss the evolution of trading activity and liquidity for these securities and how these attributes differ from on-the-run securities. We also consider several potential market structure ...
Speech
The FX Global Code: Progress Made and The Path Ahead
Remarks at FX Markets USA, New York City.
Speech
Remarks at the Next Step FX Event
Remarks at the Next Step FX Event, New York City.
Speech
Market structure and liquidity in the U.S. Treasury and agency mortgage-backed security (MBS) markets: Mortgage Bankers Association National Secondary Market Conference and Expo, New York City, May 2016
Remarks at the Mortgage Bankers Association National Secondary Market Conference and Expo, New York City.
Discussion Paper
Liquidity Fades as Treasuries Age
More than $30 trillion U.S. Treasury debt is outstanding. Less than 4 percent of this amount, which is associated with the most recently issued Treasuries, called on-the-run securities, accounts for 65 percent of average daily trading volume. The remaining portion of the amount outstanding is accounted for by seasoned issues that have been replaced by newer benchmarks, which are referred to as off-the-run securities. In this post, we review the key results in our paper that uses transaction-level Treasury TRACE data to study how trading activity and liquidity evolve as securities move from ...
Discussion Paper
Stripping STRIPs Trading Activity
In March 2020, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) began reporting aggregate trading volume for securities issued by the U.S. Treasury Department. The public data do not, however, include information about the trading activity of Separate Trading of Registered Interest and Principal of Securities (STRIPS). STRIPS are created from existing Treasury securities and offer risk management benefits, yield curve insights, and investment opportunities for a diverse range of market participants. In this post, we provide the first detailed analysis of STRIPS trading activity using ...