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Report
Did liquidity providers become liquidity seekers?
The misalignment between corporate bond and credit default swap (CDS) spreads (i.e., CDS-fbond basis) during the 2007-09 financial crisis is often attributed to corporate bond dealers shedding off their inventory, right when liquidity was scarce. This paper documents evidence against this widespread perception. In the months following Lehman?s collapse, dealers, including proprietary trading desks in investment banks, provided liquidity in response to the large selling by clients. Corporate bond inventory of dealers rose sharply as a result. Although providing liquidity, limits to arbitrage, ...
Working Paper
Dealer costs and customer choice
We introduce a model to explain how an increase in intermediation costs leads to structural changes in the corporate bond market. We state three facts on corporate bond markets after the Dodd-Frank act: (1) an increase in customer liquidity provision through prearranged matches, (2) a paradoxical decrease in measured illiquidity, and (3) an increase in the illiquidity component on the yield spread. Investors take longer to finish a trade and require higher illiquidity premium even though measured illiquidity decreased. We introduce a search and matching model which explains these facts. It ...
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 ...
Report
Alternative Trading Systems in the Corporate Bond Market
We investigate the trading of corporate bonds on alternative trading system (ATS) platforms. We draw a key distinction between request-for-quote (RFQ) and electronic communication network (ECN) trading protocols, which balance investors’ preference for immediacy and anonymity. Trades on ATS platforms are smaller and more likely to involve investment-grade bonds. Trades on ATS platforms are more probable for older, less actively traded bonds from smaller issues and for bonds traded by more dealers where inventory is high. Moreover, dealer participation on ATS platforms is associated with ...
Working Paper
How New Fed Corporate Bond Programs Dampened the Financial Accelerator in the COVID-19 Recession
In the financial crisis and recession induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, many investment-grade firms became unable to borrow from securities markets. In response, the Fed not only reopened its commercial paper funding facility but also announced it would purchase newly issued and seasoned bonds of corporations rated as investment grade before the COVID pandemic. A careful splicing of different unemployment rate series enables us to assess the effectiveness of recent Fed interventions in these long-term debt markets over long sample periods, spanning the Great Depression, Great Recession and ...
Journal Article
Trends in credit basis spreads
Market participants and policymakers were surprised by the large, prolonged dislocations in credit market basis trades during the second half of 2015 and the first quarter of 2016. In this article, we examine three explanations proposed by market participants: increased idiosyncratic risks, strategic positioning by asset managers, and regulatory changes. We find some evidence of increased idiosyncratic risk during the relevant period, but limited evidence of asset managers changing their positioning in derivative products. Although we cannot quantify the contribution of these two channels to ...
Briefing
How Post-2008 Financial Regulations Impacted Corporate Bond Liquidity
We review empirical findings regarding the impact of post-2008 financial regulations on the liquidity of corporate bond markets in the U.S. We first show that traditional measures of market liquidity improved in recent years. At the same time, the cost of illiquidity also increased. We then discuss findings showing that — after the regulations were implemented — dealer capital commitment, trade frequency and size decreased, while dealer bid-ask spread increased. The increase in dealer bid-ask spread is compensated by a change in the composition of the liquidity provision. Liquidity is ...
Discussion Paper
The Impact of the Corporate Credit Facilities
American companies have raised almost $1 trillion in the U.S. corporate bond market since March. If companies had been unable to refinance those bonds, their inability to repay may have led to an immediate default on all of their obligations, creating a cascade of defaults and layoffs. Based on Compustat data, an inability to access public bond markets could have affected companies employing more than 16 million people. In this post, we document the impact of the Primary Market and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities (PMCCF and SMCCF) on bond market functioning, summarizing a ...
Report
Credit market choice
Which markets do institutions use to change exposure to credit risk? Using a unique data set of transactions in corporate bonds and credit default swaps (CDS) by large financial institutions, we show that simultaneous transactions in both markets are rare, with an average institution having an 11 percent probability of transacting in both the CDS and bond markets in the same entity in an average week. When institutions do transact in both markets simultaneously, they increase their speculative positions in CDS by 13 cents per dollar of bond transactions, and their hedging positions by 13 ...
Working Paper
Customer Liquidity Provision : Implications for Corporate Bond Transaction Costs
The convention in calculating trading costs in corporate bond markets is to assume that dealers provide liquidity to non-dealers (customers) and calculate average bid-ask spreads that customers pay dealers. We show that customers often provide liquidity in corporate bond markets, and thus, average bid-ask spreads underestimate trading costs that customers demanding liquidity pay. Compared with periods before the 2008 financial crisis, substantial amounts of liquidity provision have moved from the dealer sector to the non-dealer sector, consistent with decreased dealer risk capacity. Among ...