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Discussion Paper
How Liquidity Standards Can Improve Lending of Last Resort Policies
Prior to the Great Recession, the focus of bank regulation was on bank capital with little consensus about the need for liquidity regulation. This view was in contrast with an existing body of academic research that pointed to inefficiencies in environments with strictly private provision of liquidity, via either interbank markets or credit line agreements. In spite of theoretical results pointing to the possible benefits of liquidity regulation for reducing fire sales in crises or the risk of panics due to coordination failures, a common view was that its costs might exceed its benefits, ...
Working Paper
Interbank Connections, Contagion and Bank Distress in the Great Depression
Liquidity shocks transmitted through interbank connections contributed to bank distress during the Great Depression. New data on interbank connections reveal that banks were much more likely to close when their correspondents closed. Further, after the Federal Reserve was established, banks? management of cash and capital buffers was less responsive to network risk, suggesting that banks expected the Fed to reduce network risk. Because the Fed?s presence removed the incentives for the most systemically important banks to maintain capital and cash buffers that had protected against liquidity ...
Working Paper
Bond Flows and Liquidity: Do Foreigners Matter?
In their search for yield in the current low interest rate environment, many investors have turned to sovereign debt in emerging economies, which has raised concerns about risks to financial stability from these capital flows. To assess this risk, we study the effects of changes in the foreign-held share of Mexican sovereign bonds on their liquidity premiums. We find that recent increases in foreign holdings of these securities have played a significant role in driving up their liquidity premiums. Provided the higher compensation for bearing liquidity risk is commensurate with the chance of a ...
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 ...
Working Paper
Inflation Expectations and Risk Premia in Emerging Bond Markets: Evidence from Mexico
To study inflation expectations and associated risk premia in emerging bond markets, thispaper provides estimates for Mexico based on an arbitrage-free dynamic term structuremodel of nominal and real bond prices that accounts for their liquidity risk. In addition todocumenting the existence of large and time-varying liquidity premia in nominal and realbond prices that are only weakly correlated, the results indicate that long-term inflationexpectations in Mexico are well anchored close to the inflation target of the Bank ofMexico. Furthermore, Mexican inflation risk premia are larger and more ...
Discussion Paper
Banking System Vulnerability: 2024 Update
After a period of relative stability, a series of bank failures in 2023 renewed questions about the fragility of the banking system. As in previous years, we provide in this post an update of four analytical models aimed at capturing different aspects of the vulnerability of the U.S. banking system using data through 2024:Q2 and discuss how these measures have changed since last year.
Working Paper
Accounting for Low Long-Term Interest Rates: Evidence from Canada
In recent decades, long-term interest rates around the world have fallen to historic lows. We examine this decline using a dynamic term structure model of Canadian nominal and real yields with adjustments for term, liquidity, and inflation risk premiums. Canada provides a useful case study that has been little examined despite its established indexed debt market, negligible distortions from monetary quantitative easing or the zero lower bound, and no sovereign credit risk. We find that since 2000, the steady-state real interest rate has fallen by more than 2 percentage points, long-term ...
Working Paper
Central Clearing and Systemic Liquidity Risk
By stepping between bilateral counterparties, a central counterparty (CCP) transforms credit exposure. CCPs generally improve financial stability. Nevertheless, large CCPs are by nature concentrated and interconnected with major global banks. Moreover, although they mitigate credit risk, CCPs create liquidity risks, because they rely on participants to provide cash. Such requirements increase with both market volatility and default; consequently, CCP liquidity needs are inherently procyclical. This procyclicality makes it more challenging to assess CCP resilience in the rare event that one or ...
Working Paper
The Benefit of Inflation-Indexed Debt: Evidence from an Emerging Bond Market
Portfolio diversification is as important to debt management as it is to asset management. In this paper, we focus on diversification of sovereign debt issuance through greater reliance on inflation-indexed bonds for a representative emerging economy, Colombia. Using an arbitrage-free dynamic term structure model of fixed-coupon and inflation-indexed bond prices, we account for inflation and liquidity risk premia and calculate the net benefit of issuing inflation-indexed bonds over nominal bonds. Our results suggest that the Colombian government could lower its funding costs by as much as ...