Hey, Economist! Tobias Adrian Reflects on His Work at the N.Y. Fed before Heading to the IMF

Tobias Adrian is leaving the New York Fed to become the Financial Counselor and Director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In announcing Adrian’s appointment, Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, described Tobias as “internationally highly regarded for his insightful analytical work.” Until he starts his new position at the beginning of 2017, Adrian will be winding down his service as Senior Vice President of the New York Fed and Associate Director of the Bank’s Research and Statistics Group. Before he moves on to the IMF, Adrian shared some insight on his time at the Bank.

At the N.Y. Fed: Capital Flows, Policy Dilemmas, and the Future of Global Financial Integration

Bianca De Paoli, Luca Dedola, Linda Goldberg, Arnaud Mehl, John Rogers, and Livio Stracca



The New York Fed recently hosted the third biannual Global Research Forum on International Macroeconomics and Finance, an event organized in conjunction with the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Federal Reserve Board. Bringing together a diverse group of academics, policymakers, and market participants, the two-day conference (November 17-18) was aimed at promoting discussion of frontier research on empirical and theoretical issues in international finance, banking, and open-economy macroeconomics. Understanding the drivers and implications of international capital flows was a major area of focus, along with the policy challenges posed by global financial integration.

Investigating the Proposed Overnight Treasury GC Repo Benchmark Rates

Alexandra Altman, Kathryn Bayeux, Marco Cipriani, Adam Copeland, Scott Sherman, Brett Solimine

Editor’s note: When this post was first published, the linked file with historical rates and volumes for the three Treasury repo rates had some minor errors. The data and related charts have been corrected. These changes did not alter the authors’ conclusions. (January 30, 2018, 4:00 p.m.)

Editor’s note: In the data file originally released with this post, some repo volume figures were misaligned with their dates; the problem has been corrected. (December 19, 2016, 11:15 a.m.)



In its recent “Statement Regarding the Publication of Overnight Treasury GC Repo Rates,” the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in cooperation with the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research, announced the potential publication of three overnight Treasury general collateral (GC) repurchase (repo) benchmark rates. Each of the proposed rates is designed to capture a particular segment of repo market activity. All three rates, as currently envisioned, would initially be based on transaction-level overnight GC repo trades occurring on tri-party repo platforms. The first rate would only include transactions in the tri-party repo market, excluding both General Collateral Finance Repo Service, or GCF Repo®, transactions and Federal Reserve transactions. (GCF Repo is a registered service mark of the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation.) Henceforth in this post, this segment will be referred to as tri-party ex-GCF/Fed. The second rate would build on the first by including GCF Repo trading activity while still excluding Federal Reserve transactions. Finally, the third rate would include tri-party ex-GCF/Fed transactions, GCF Repo transactions, and Federal Reserve transactions. The repo benchmark rates would be calculated as volume-weighted medians, as is currently the case for the production of the effective federal funds rate (EFFR) and the overnight bank funding rate (OBFR), and would be accompanied by summary statistics. The three proposed rate compositions result from staff analysis on the various market segments and characteristic trading behavior, though the New York Fed expects to work with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System to seek public comment on the composition and calculation methodology for these rates before adopting a final publication plan.

Just Released: Regional Business Surveys Point to Growth in Economic Activity

By Jason Bram and Richard Deitz



The latest editions of the New York Fed’s two regional business surveys point to improvement in business conditions and widespread optimism about the near-term outlook. The December Business Leaders Survey of regional service firms, released today, shows service sector activity steadying after declining for a number of months, and the December Empire State Manufacturing Survey, released yesterday, indicates that manufacturing activity increased for the first time since the summer.

Are All CLOs Equal?

Stavros Peristiani and João A.C. Santos

Asset securitization is an important source of corporate funding in capital markets. Collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) are securitization structures that allow syndicated bank lenders and bond underwriters to repackage business loans and sell them to investors as securities. CLOs are actively overseen by a collateral manager that has the responsibility to trade loans in the portfolio to benefit from gains and mitigate losses from credit exposures. Because CLOs include a diverse portfolio of loans, a single firm that commingles its lending role with the collateral management role can reap information advantages stemming from its “originate-to-distribute” activities.

At the N.Y. Fed: Second Annual Conference on the Evolving Structure of the U.S. Treasury Market

Ellen Correia Golay, Michael Fleming, Frank Keane, and Nathaniel Wuerffel



The New York Fed recently hosted a second conference on the evolving structure of the Treasury market, co-sponsored with the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve Board, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The conference reviewed developments in the Treasury market since the Joint Staff Report on the “flash rally” of October 15, 2014, and the preceding year’s conference on the evolving structure of the Treasury market, including advances related to transaction data reporting and official perspectives on rules and regulations.