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Discussion Paper
How Does Tick Size Affect Treasury Market Quality?
The popularity of U.S. Treasury securities as a means of pricing other securities, managing interest rate risk, and storing value is, in part, due to the efficiency and liquidity of the U.S. Treasury market. Any structural changes that might affect these attributes of the market are therefore of interest to market participants and policymakers alike. In this post, we consider how a 2018 change in the minimum price increment, or tick size, for the 2-year U.S. Treasury note affected market quality, following our recently updated New York Fed staff report.
Discussion Paper
Characterizing the Rising Settlement Fails in Seasoned Treasury Securities
In a 2014 post, we described what settlement fails are, why they arise and matter, and how they can be measured. A subsequent post explored the determinants of the increased volume of U.S. Treasury security settlement fails in June 2014. Part of that episode reflected a steady increase in settlement fails of seasoned securities. In this post, we explore the characteristics of seasoned fails in recent years, in order to better understand the risks associated with such fails.
Report
Financial market implications of the federal debt paydown
U.S. Treasury securities fill several crucial roles in financial markets: they are a risk-free benchmark, a reference and hedging benchmark, and a reserve asset to the Federal Reserve and other financial institutions. Many of the features that make the Treasury market an attractive benchmark and reserve asset are likely to be adversely affected by the paydown of the federal debt, and recent developments suggest that this may be happening already. Market participants are responding by moving away from Treasuries as a reference and hedging benchmark toward agency debt securities, corporate debt ...
Report
Liquidity and volatility in the U.S. treasury market
We model the joint dynamics of intraday liquidity, volume, and volatility in the U.S. Treasury market, especially through the 2007-09 financial crisis and around important economic announcements. Using various specifications based on Bauwens and Giot?s (2000) Log- ACD(1,1) model, we find that liquidity, volume, and volatility are highly persistent, with volatility having a lower short-term persistence than the other two. Market liquidity and volume are important to explaining volatility dynamics but not vice versa. In addition, market dynamics change during the financial crisis, with all ...
Discussion Paper
How Liquid Has the Treasury Market Been in 2022?
Policymakers and market participants are closely watching liquidity conditions in the U.S. Treasury securities market. Such conditions matter because liquidity is crucial to the many important uses of Treasury securities in financial markets. But just how liquid has the market been and how unusual is the liquidity given the higher-than-usual volatility? In this post, we assess the recent evolution of Treasury market liquidity and its relationship with price volatility and find that while the market has been less liquid in 2022, it has not been unusually illiquid after accounting for the high ...
Speech
Preparing for the Unknown
Remarks at the 2021 U.S. Treasury Market Conference (delivered via videoconference).
Report
The microstructure of a U.S. Treasury ECN: the BrokerTec platform
We assess the microstructure of the U.S. Treasury securities market following its migration to electronic trading. We model price discovery using a vector autoregression model of price and order flow. We show that both trades and limit orders affect price dynamics, suggesting that traders also choose limit orders to exploit their information. Moreover, while limit orders have smaller price impact, their greater variation contributes more to the variance of price updates. Lastly, we find increased price impact of trades and especially limit orders following major announcements (such as FOMC ...
Report
Market liquidity after the financial crisis
This paper examines market liquidity in the post-crisis era in light of concerns that regulatory changes might have reduced dealers? ability and willingness to make markets. We begin with a discussion of the broader trading environment, including an overview of regulations and their potential effects on dealer balance sheets and market making, but also considering additional drivers of market liquidity. We document a stagnation of dealer balance sheets after the financial crisis of 2007-09, which occurred concurrently with dealer balance sheet deleveraging. However, using high-frequency trade ...
Discussion Paper
Bank Supervisory Goals versus Monetary Policy Implementation
The global financial crisis of 2007–09 revealed substantial weaknesses in large banks' capital adequacy and liquidity. Bank regulators responded with a variety of prudential measures intended to strengthen both. However, these prudential measures resulted in conflicts with the implementation of monetary policy that helped alter the way the Federal Reserve conducts monetary policy. I review three such conflicts: regulation inhibiting interest on excess reserves arbitrage starting in 2008, regulation inhibiting banks' operations in the repo market in 2019, and regulation inhibiting their ...
Working Paper
Price Pressure and Price Discovery in the Term Structure of Interest Rates
We study the price pressure and price discovery effects in the U.S. Treasury market by using a term structure model. Our model decomposes yield curve shifts into two components: a virtually permanent change related to order flow and a transitory, price pressure effect due to dealer inventories. We find strong evidence that net dealer Treasury inventories has impact on the yield curve. Cash Treasury instruments in inventory have a larger impact on yields than futures contracts, suggesting that cash and futures inventories are not perfect substitutes. Price discovery in the level of interest ...