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Discussion Paper
The Final Crisis Chronicle: The Panic of 1907 and the Birth of the Fed
The panic of 1907 was among the most severe we’ve covered in our series and also the most transformative, as it led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System. Also known as the “Knickerbocker Crisis,” the panic of 1907 shares features with the 2007-08 crisis, including “shadow banks” in the form high-flying, less-regulated trusts operating beyond the safety net of the time, and a pivotal “Lehman moment” when Knickerbocker Trust, the second-largest trust in the country, was allowed to fail after J.P. Morgan refused to save it.
Discussion Paper
The Growth of Murky Finance
Building upon previous posts in this series that discussed individual banks, we examine the historical growth of the entire financial sector, relative to the rest of the economy. This sector’s historically large share of the economy today (see chart below) and its role in disrupting the functioning of the real economy during the recent financial crisis have led to questions about the social value of costly financial services. While new regulations such as the Dodd-Frank Act impose restrictions on financial activities and increase their costs, especially those of large firms, our paper ...
Working Paper
Money Matters: Broad Divisia Money and the Recovery of Nominal GDP from the COVID-19 Recession
The rise of inflation in 2021 and 2022 surprised many macroeconomists who ignored the earlier surge in money growth because past instability in the demand for simple-sum monetary aggregates had made these aggregates unreliable indicators. We find that the demand for more theoretically-based Divisia aggregates can be modeled and that their growth rates provide useful information for future nominal GDP growth.Unlike M2 and Divisia-M2, whose velocities do not internalize shifts in liabilities across commercial and shadow banks, the velocities of broader Divisia monetary aggregates are more ...
Journal Article
Components of U.S. financial sector growth, 1950-2013
The U.S. financial sector grew steadily as a share of the total business sector from 1959 until the recent financial crisis, when the trend reversed. In this article, the authors develop measures based on firm-level data to estimate the size of the financial sector and its subsectors relative to the total business (financial and nonfinancial) sector over time. The analysis further sheds light on how these size measures are affected by a firm?s choice of financing (whether public or private), firm size, industry type, use of leverage, and regulation. The authors find that the relative size of ...
Working Paper
Financing Modes and Lender Monitoring
Shadow banks are widely believed to be a creation of financial regulation and regulatory arbitrage. We show that bank and nonbank modes of financing can emerge endogenously in a simple borrower-lender framework absent regulatory arbitrage or policy interventions. The coexistence of banks and shadow banks in the absence of regulatory intervention speaks to the importance of shadow banks as alternative modes of financial intermediation. We explore the scope of regulation in determining the size and location of shadow banking, as opposed to how regulation can be designed to curtail shadow bank ...
Discussion Paper
The Side Effects of Shadow Banking on Liquidity Provision
Over the past two decades, the growth of shadow banking has transformed the way the U.S. banking system funds corporations. In this post, we describe how this growth has affected both the term loan and credit line businesses, and how the changes have resulted in a reduction in the liquidity insurance provided to firms.
Working Paper
Shadow Bank Runs
Short-term debt is commonly used to fund illiquid assets. A conventional view asserts that such arrangements are run-prone in part because redemptions must be processed on a first-come, first-served basis. This sequential service protocol, however, appears absent in the wholesale banking sector—and yet, shadow banks appear vulnerable to runs. We explain how banking arrangements that fund fixed-cost operations using short-term debt can be run-prone even in the absence of sequential service. Interventions designed to eliminate run risk may or may not improve depositor welfare. We describe how ...
Working Paper
Banks as Patient Fixed Income Investors
We examine the business model of traditional commercial banks in the context of their co-existence with shadow banks. While both types of intermediaries create safe "money-like" claims, they go about this in very different ways. Traditional banks create safe claims with a combination of costly equity capital and fixed income assets that allows their depositors to remain "sleepy": they do not have to pay attention to transient fluctuations in the mark-to-market value of bank assets. In contrast, shadow banks create safe claims by giving their investors an early exit option that allows them ...
Discussion Paper
The Impact of Natural Disasters on the Corporate Loan Market
Natural disasters are usually associated with an increase in the demand for credit by both households and companies in the affected regions. However, if capacity constraints preclude banks from meeting the local increase in demand, the banks may reduce lending elsewhere, thus propagating the shock to unaffected areas. In this post, we analyze the corporate loan market and find that banks, particularly those with lower capital, reduce credit provisioning to distant regions unaffected by natural disasters. We also find that shadow banks only partially offset the reduction in bank credit, so ...