What Explains Shareholder Payouts by Large Banks?

Beverly Hirtle

Editor's note: This post has been corrected to show that the $750 billion increase in common equity at CCAR banks since 2009 reflects a rise of more than 150 percent. (October 20, 2017, 2:06 p.m.)



On June 28, the Federal Reserve released the latest results of the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR), the supervisory program that assesses the capital adequacy and capital planning processes of large, complex banking companies. The Fed did not object to any of the banks’ capital plans, an outcome that was widely heralded as a signal that these banks would be able to increase payouts to their shareholders. And in fact, immediately following the release of the CCAR results, several large banks announced substantial increases in quarterly dividends and record-sized share repurchase programs. In this post, we put these announced increases into recent historical context, showing how banks’ payouts to shareholders have increased since the financial crisis and describing how CCAR has affected the composition of payouts between dividends and share repurchases.

Discretionary Services Spending Has Finally Made It Back (to 2007)

Jonathan McCarthy



The current economic expansion is now the third-longest expansion in U.S. history (based on National Bureau of Economic Research [NBER] dating of U.S. business cycles). Even so, average growth in this expansion—a 2.1 percent annual rate—has been extraordinarily weak. In this post, I return to previous analysis on a specific portion of consumer spending—household discretionary services expenditures—that has displayed unusual weakness in the current expansion (see this post for the definition of discretionary versus nondiscretionary services expenditures, and these posts from 2012 and 2014 for previous updates). Even though these expenditures have picked up over the past couple of years, such that they have finally exceeded their previous peak, their recovery remains well behind that of other major categories of consumer spending. One explanation for the slow growth of spending on discretionary services is that households are concerned about their future income.

Upstate New York’s Expansion Is Losing Steam

Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz



All in all, the upstate New York economy fared pretty well during the last business cycle. Job losses were less severe in upstate New York during the Great Recession than they were for the nation as a whole, which was quite unusual. And once the jobs recovery began in 2010, employment in upstate New York started to grow again, though at a pace well below the nation’s. The result of this slow but steady recovery was that by mid-2015, upstate New York had gained back all of the jobs that were lost during the Great Recession—a milestone the region had failed to reach at all during the prior few business cycles. Troublingly, though, job growth in the region stalled shortly after crossing this milestone. Indeed, only a handful of jobs have been added to the area’s total employment count since early 2016. In this blog post, we explore the nature and magnitude of this slowdown in upstate New York.

Just Released: New York Fed Markets Data Dashboard

Antoine Martin, Susan McLaughlin, and Jordan Pollinger



The Federal Reserve Bank of New York releases data on a number of market operations, reference rates, monetary policy expectations, and Federal Reserve securities portfolio holdings. These data are released at different times, for different types of securities or rates, and for different audiences. In an effort to bring this information together in a single, convenient location, the New York Fed developed the Markets Data Dashboard, which was launched today.

U.S. Monetary Policy as a Changing Driver of Global Liquidity

Stefan Avdjiev, Leonardo Gambacorta, Linda S. Goldberg, and Stefano Schiaffi



International capital flows channel large volumes of funds across borders to both public and private sector borrowers. As they are critically important for economic growth and financial stability, understanding their main drivers is crucial for both policymakers and researchers. In this post, we explore the evolving impact of changes in U.S. monetary policy on global liquidity.

How Is Online Shopping Affecting Retail Employment?

Jason Bram and Nicole Gorton



It’s been said that if you want to know how the economy is doing, look at how many people are carrying shopping bags. That adage may not hold so well today. The rise of the internet and e-commerce over the past two decades has chipped away at the market share of “brick and mortar” retailers. But it’s only been in the past few years that this shift in market share has had a noteworthy effect on retail employment. In this post, we focus on national and local employment trends in two categories of retail—department stores and nonstore retailers—and try to assess how the surge in online shopping has affected local labor markets across the United States.

The Cost and Duration of Excess Funding Capacity in Tri-Party Repo

Adam Copeland, Ira Selig, and Noah Zinsmeister

Editor's note: In the original version of this blog post, a computational error was reflected in the chart “Distribution of Premiums Paid on ‘Excess Capacity’ Repos” and related text. Both have been corrected. (October 23, 2017, 12:37 p.m.)



In a previous post, we showed that dealers sometimes enter into tri-party repo contracts to acquire excess funding capacity, and that this strategy is most prevalent for the agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and equity asset classes. In this post, we examine the maturity of the repos used to pursue this strategy and estimate the associated costs. We find that repos that generate excess funding capacity for equities and corporate debt have longer maturities than the average repo involving either of these asset classes. Furthermore, the premiums dealers pay to maintain excess funding capacity can be substantial, particularly for equities.

Excess Funding Capacity in Tri-Party Repo

Adam Copeland, Ira Selig, and Noah Zinsmeister



Security dealers sometimes enter into tri-party repo contracts to fund one class of securities with the expectation they will wind up settling the contract with higher quality securities. This strategy is costly to dealers because they could have borrowed funds at lower rates had they agreed to use the higher-quality securities at the outset. So why do dealers do this? Why obtain or arrange excess funding for the initial asset class? In this post, we discuss possible rationales for an excess funding strategy and measure the extent of excess funding capacity in the tri-party repo market. In a second post, we examine the maturities of repos used to generate excess funding capacity and estimate the costs of this strategy.