Search Results
Journal Article
Stability of funding models: an analytical framework
With the recent financial crisis, many financial intermediaries experienced strains created by declining asset values and a loss of funding sources. In reviewing these stress events, one notices that some arrangements appear to have been more stable?that is, better able to withstand shocks to their asset values and/or funding sources?than others. Because the precise determinants of this stability are not well understood, gaining a better grasp of them is a critical task for market participants and policymakers as they try to design more resilient arrangements and improve financial regulation. ...
Discussion Paper
Mitigating the Risk of Runs on Uninsured Deposits: the Minimum Balance at Risk
The incentives that drive bank runs have been well understood since the seminal work of Nobel laureates Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig (1983). When a bank is suspected to be insolvent, early withdrawers can get the full value of their deposits. If and when the bank runs out of funds, however, the bank cannot pay remaining depositors. As a result, all depositors have an incentive to run. The failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank remind us that these incentives are still present for uninsured depositors, that is, those whose bank deposits are larger than deposit insurance ...
Working Paper
Explaining the Life Cycle of Bank-Sponsored Money Market Funds: An Application of the Regulatory Dialectic
In this paper, we present empirical evidence of the regulatory dialectic in the prime institutional money market fund (PI-MMF) industry. The “regulatory dialectic”, developed by Kane (1977, 1981), describes how banks and regulators react to each other. For decades, a cap on commercial deposit interest rates fueled dramatic growth in bank-sponsored PI-MMFs as a form of shadow banking. During the growth period, banks with more commercial deposits were more likely to enter the PI-MMF industry in an effort to keep their commercial customers in affiliated subsidiaries. However, the 2008 crisis ...
Report
Investor Attention to Bank Risk During the Spring 2023 Bank Run
We examine how investors’ perceptions of bank balance sheet risk evolved before and during the bank run in March-April 2023. To do so, we estimate the covariance (“beta”) of bank excess stock returns with returns on factors constructed from long-short portfolios sorted on shares of uninsured deposits and unrealized losses on securities. We find that investor perception of bank risk shifted, as the factor betas are insignificant before the bank run but become positive and significant during the run. In the crosssection, increases in the betas occurred for a limited set of banks and ...
Discussion Paper
Reallocating Liquidity to Resolve a Crisis
Shortly after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in March 2023, a consortium of eleven large U.S. financial institutions deposited $30 billion into First Republic Bank to bolster its liquidity and assuage panic among uninsured depositors. In the end, however, First Republic Bank did not survive, raising the question of whether a reallocation of liquidity among financial institutions can ever reduce the need for central bank balance sheet expansion in the fight against bank runs. We explore this question in this post, based on a recent working paper.
Report
Who Can Tell Which Banks Will Fail?
We study the run on the German banking system in 1931 to study whether depositors anticipate which banks will fail. We find that deposits decline by around 20 percent during the run. There is an equal outflow of retail and non-financial wholesale deposits from both failing and surviving banks. In contrast, we find that interbank deposits decline almost exclusively for failing banks. Our evidence suggests that while regular depositors are uninformed, banks have precise information about which banks will fail. In turn, banks being informed allows the interbank market to continue providing ...
Briefing
Anatomy of the Bank Runs in March 2023
Runs have plagued the banking system for centuries and returned to prominence with the bank failures in early 2023. In a traditional run — such as depicted in classic photos from the Great Depression — depositors line up in front of a bank to withdraw their cash. This is not how modern bank runs occur: Today, depositors move money from a risky to a safe bank through electronic payment systems. In a recently published staff report, we use data on wholesale and retail payments to understand the bank run of March 2023.1 Which banks were run on? How were they different from other banks? And ...
Discussion Paper
What Makes a Bank Stable? A Framework for Analysis
One of the major roles of banks and other financial intermediaries is to channel funds from savings into valuable projects. In doing so, banks engage in “liquidity and maturity transformation,” since they finance long-term, illiquid projects while funding themselves with short-term, liquid liabilities. By performing this important role, banks expose themselves to the risk of runs: If depositors or other short-term creditors worry about their claims, they may withdraw funds en masse and cause the bank to fail. The recent financial crisis once again highlighted the fragility associated with ...
Journal Article
Literature review on the stability of funding models
Financial intermediaries have an important role as liquidity providers?they perform maturity and liquidity transformation by issuing liquid, short-term liabilities while holding illiquid, long-term assets. But there is an inherent fragility associated with this role. This article provides a review of the economics literature on the stability of banks and other financial intermediaries, with a policy-oriented focus on their funding models. Yorulmazer employs the standard framework used in the literature to examine the fragility of intermediaries that conduct maturity and liquidity ...
Working Paper
Deposit Convexity, Monetary Policy and Financial Stability
In principle, bank deposits can be withdrawn on demand. In practice, depositors tend to maintain stable balances for long periods, allowing banks to fund long-dated assets. Nevertheless, the cost of deposit funding influences banks’ capacity for maturity transformation. Banks and researchers conventionally model the response of deposit interest rates to market interest rates as constant, implying that deposits have nearly constant duration. Contrary to this standard assumption, we show empirically that the “beta” of deposit rates to market rates increases as market rates rise, causing ...