66 posts on "Treasury"
March 24, 2021
Did Dealers Fail to Make Markets during the Pandemic?
Sarkar and coauthors liquidity provision by dealers in several important financial markets during the COVID-19 pandemic: how much was provided, possible causes of any shortfalls, and the effects of the Federal Reserve’s actions to support the economy.
February 18, 2021
How Competitive are U.S. Treasury Repo Markets?
The Treasury repo market is at the center of the U.S. financial system, serving as a source of secured funding as well as providing liquidity for Treasuries in the secondary market. Recently, results published by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) raised concerns that the repo market may be dominated by as few as four banks. In this post, we show that the secured funding portion of the repo market is competitive by demonstrating that trading is not concentrated overall and explaining how the pricing of inter-dealer repo trades is available to a wide-range of market participants. By extension, rate-indexes based on repo trades, such as SOFR, reflect a deep market with a broad set of participants.
Posted at 7:00 am in Bank Capital, Banks, Financial Institutions, Financial Markets, Liquidity, Repo, Treasury | Permalink
November 30, 2020
Treasury Market When‑Issued Trading Activity
Despite the importance of when-issued trading of Treasury securities, and the advent of FINRA’s TRACE database of trading statistics, little is known publicly about the level of WI activity. In this post, the authors address this gap by analyzing WI transactions recorded in TRACE.
August 24, 2020
Explaining the Puzzling Behavior of Short‑Term Money Market Rates
Since 2008, the Federal Reserve has dramatically increased the supply of bank reserves, effectively adopting a floor system for monetary policy implementation. Since then, the behavior of short-term money market rates has been at times puzzling. In particular, short-term rates have been surprisingly firm in recent months, despite the large increase in reserves by the Fed as a part of its response to the coronavirus pandemic. In this post, we provide evidence that both the supply of reserves and the supply of short-term Treasury securities are important factors for explaining short-term rates.
July 1, 2020
How Liquid Is the New 20‑Year Treasury Bond?
Fleming and Ruela take a first look at the U.S. government’s new 20-year bond, using a short sample of available data to describe its trading activity and liquidity.
April 6, 2020
How the Fed Managed the Treasury Yield Curve in the 1940s
The coronavirus pandemic has prompted the Federal Reserve to pledge to purchase Treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities in the amount needed to support the smooth market functioning and effective transmission of monetary policy to the economy. But some market participants have questioned whether something more might not be required, including possibly some form of direct yield curve control. In the first half of the 1940s the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) sought to manage the level and shape of the Treasury yield curve. In this post, we examine what can be learned from the FOMC’s efforts of seventy-five years ago.
Posted at 7:00 am in Economic History, Fed Funds, Federal Reserve, Fiscal Policy, Pandemic, Treasury | Permalink
October 15, 2019
From the Vault: A Look Back at the October 15, 2014, Flash Rally
Fleming, Johansson, Keane, and Meyer present a synopsis of work from the Liberty Street Economics archive on a 2014 flash episode when U.S. Treasury yields plunged and rebounded for no obvious reason.
July 17, 2019
How Do Large Banks Manage Their Cash?
As the aggregate supply of reserves shrinks and large banks implement liquidity regulations, they may follow a variety of liquidity management strategies depending on their business models and the interest rate differences between alternative liquid instruments. For example, the banks may continue to hold large amounts of excess reserves or shift to Treasury or agency securities or shrink their balance sheets. In this post, we provide new evidence on how large banks have managed their cash, which is the largest component of reserves, on a daily basis since the implementation of liquidity regulations.
Posted at 7:00 am in Banks, Federal Reserve, Liquidity, Regulation, Repo, Treasury | Permalink | Comments (2)
March 6, 2019
Assessing the Price Impact of Treasury Market Workups
The price impact of a trade derives largely from its informational content. The “workup” mechanism, a trading protocol used in the U.S. Treasury securities market, is designed to mitigate the instantaneous price impact of a trade by allowing market participants to trade additional quantities of a security after a buyer and seller first agree on its price. Nevertheless, workup trades are not necessarily free of information. In this post, we assess the role of workups in price discovery, following our recent paper in the Review of Asset Pricing Studies (an earlier version of which was released as a New York Fed staff report).
February 27, 2019
Global Trends in Interest Rates
Long-term government bond yields are at their lowest levels of the past 150 years in advanced economies. In this blog post, we argue that this low-interest-rate environment reflects secular global forces that have lowered real interest rates by about two percentage points over the past forty years. The magnitude of this decline has been nearly the same in all advanced economies, since their real interest rates have converged over this period. The key factors behind this development are an increase in demand for safety and liquidity among investors and a slowdown in global economic growth.
Posted at 7:00 am in Banks, Central Bank, Credit, Expectations, Federal Reserve, Financial Institutions, Financial Markets, Inflation, Liquidity, Macroeconomics, Monetary Policy, Treasury | Permalink | Comments (2)
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