Search Results
Report
The Evolution of Treasury Market Liquidity: Evidence from 30 Years of Limit Order Book Data
This paper uses order book and transactions data from the U.S. Treasury securities market to calculate daily liquidity measures for a thirty-year sample period (1991–2021). We then construct a daily index of liquidity from bid-ask spreads, quoted depth, and price impact, reflecting the fact that the varying measures capture different aspects of market liquidity. The index is highly correlated with liquidity proxies proposed in the literature, but is more sensitive to short-term drivers of liquidity, suggesting that it better measures contemporaneous liquidity (as opposed to expected future ...
Discussion Paper
How the Fed Changes the Size of Its Balance Sheet
The size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet increased greatly between 2009 and 2014 owing to large-scale asset purchases. The balance sheet has stayed at a high level since then through the ongoing reinvestment of principal repayments on securities that the Fed holds. When the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) decides to reduce the size of the Fed’s balance sheet, it is expected to do so by gradually reducing the pace of reinvestments, as outlined in the June 2017 addendum to the FOMC’s Policy Normalization Principles and Plans. How do asset purchases increase the size of the ...
Working Paper
Unconventional monetary policy and the behavior of shorts
In November 2008, the Federal Reserve announced the first of a series of unconventional monetary policies, which would include asset purchases and forward guidance, to reduce long-term interest rates. We investigate the behavior of shorts, considered sophisticated investors, before and after a set of these unconventional monetary policy announcements that spot bond markets did not fully anticipate. Short interest in agency securities systematically predicts bond price changes and other asset returns on the days of monetary announcements, particularly when growth or monetary news is released, ...
Report
Fragility of Safe Asset Markets
In March 2020, safe asset markets experienced surprising and unprecedented price crashes. We explain how strategic investor behavior can create such market fragility in a model with investors valuing safety, investors valuing liquidity, and constrained dealers. While safety investors and liquidity investors can interact symbiotically with offsetting trades in times of stress, liquidity investors’ strategic interaction harbors the potential for self-fulfilling fragility. When the market is fragile, standard flight-to-safety can have a destabilizing effect and trigger a “dash-for-cash” by ...
Speech
The Federal Reserve’s Recent Actions to Support the Flow of Credit to Households and Businesses
Remarks before the Foreign Exchange Committee, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City.
Discussion Paper
Pick Your Poison: How Money Market Funds Reacted to Financial Stress in 2011
The summer of 2011 was an unsettling period for financial markets. In the United States, Congress was unable to agree to terms for raising the debt ceiling until August, creating considerable uncertainty over whether the government would be forced to default on its debt. In Europe, the borrowing costs of some peripheral countries increased dramatically, raising questions about the health of some of the largest banks. In this post, we analyze data recently made public by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to see how the U.S. money market mutual fund (MMF) industry reacted to these ...
Discussion Paper
Information on Dealer Activity in Specific Treasury Issues Now Available
The New York Fed has long collected market information from its primary dealer trading counterparts and released these data in aggregated form to the public. Until recently, such data have only been available for broad categories of securities (for example, Treasury bills as a group) and not for specific securities. In April 2013, the Fed began releasing data on some specific Treasury issues, allowing for a more refined understanding of market conditions and dealer behavior.
Speech
A Solution to Every Puzzle
Remarks at the 2020 U.S. Treasury Market Conference (delivered via videoconference).
Working Paper
Supply and demand shifts of shorts before Fed announcements during QE1–QE3
Cohen, Diether, and Malloy (Journal of Finance, 2007), find that shifts in the demand curve predict negative stock returns. We use their approach to examine changes in supply and demand at the time of FOMC announcements. We show that shifts in the demand for borrowing Treasuries and agencies predict quantitative easing. A reduction in the quantity demanded at all points along the demand curve predicts expansionary quantitative easing announcements.
Discussion Paper
Primary Dealers’ Waning Role in Treasury Auctions
In this post, we quantify the macroeconomic effects of central bank announcements about future federal funds rates, or forward guidance. We estimate that a commitment to lowering future rates below market expectations can have fairly strong effects on real economic activity with only small effects on inflation.