166 posts on "Banks"
August 7, 2025
Flood Risk and Flood Insurance
Recent natural disasters have renewed concerns about insurance markets for natural disaster relief. In January 2025, wildfires wreaked havoc in residential areas outside of Los Angeles. Direct damage estimates for the Los Angeles wildfires range from $76 billion to $131 billion, with only up to $45 billion of insured losses (Li and Yu, 2025). In this post, we examine the state of another disaster insurance market: the flood insurance market. We review features of flood insurance mandates, flood insurance take-up, and connect this to work in a related Staff Report that explores how mortgage lenders manage their exposure to flood risk. Mortgages are a transmission channel for monetary policy and also an important financial product for both banks and nonbank lenders that actively participate in the mortgage market.
August 5, 2025
A Check‑In on the Mortgage Market
Debt balances continued to march upward in the second quarter of 2025, according to the latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit from the New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data. Mortgage balances in particular saw an increase of $131 billion. Following a steep rise in home prices since 2019, several housing markets have seen dips in prices and concerns were sparked about the state of the mortgage market. Here, we disaggregate mortgage balances and delinquency rates by type and region to better understand the landscape of the current mortgage market, where any ongoing risks may lie, regionally and by product.
July 14, 2025
Who Lends to Households and Firms?
The financial sector in the U.S. economy is deeply interconnected. In our previous post, we showed that incorporating information about this network of financial claims leads to a substantial reassessment of which financial sectors are ultimately financing the lending to the real sector as a whole (households plus nonfinancial firms). In this post, we delve deeper into the differences between the composition of lending to households and nonfinancial firms in terms of direct lending as well as the patterns of “adjusted lending” that we compute by accounting for the network of claims financial subsectors have on each other.
July 10, 2025
The Rise in Deposit Flightiness and Its Implications for Financial Stability
Deposits are often perceived as a stable funding source for banks. However, the risk of deposits rapidly leaving banks—known as deposit flightiness—has come under increased scrutiny following the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and other regional banks in March 2023. In a new paper, we show that deposit flightiness is not constant over time. In particular, flightiness reached historic highs after expansions in bank reserves associated with rounds of quantitative easing (QE). We argue that this elevated deposit flightiness may amplify the banking sector’s response to subsequent monetary policy rate hikes, highlighting a link between the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet and conventional monetary policy.
June 26, 2025
Financial Intermediaries and the Changing Risk Sensitivity of Global Liquidity Flows
Global risk conditions, along with monetary policy in major advanced economies, have historically been major drivers of cross-border capital flows and the global financial cycle. So what happens to these flows when risk sentiment changes? In this post, we examine how the sensitivity to risk of global financial flows changed following the global financial crisis (GFC). We find that while the risk sensitivity of cross-border bank loans (CBL) was lower following the GFC, that of international debt securities (IDS) remained the same as before the GFC. Moreover, the changes in risk sensitivities of these flows were related to balance sheet constraints of financial institutions that were intermediating these flows.
June 23, 2025
Reserves and Where to Find Them
Banks use central bank reserves for a multitude of purposes including making payments, managing intraday liquidity outflows, and meeting regulatory and internal liquidity requirements. Data on aggregate reserves for the U.S. banking system are readily accessible, but information on the holdings of individual banks is confidential. This makes it difficult to investigate important questions like: “Which types of banks hold reserves?” “How concentrated are they?” and “Does the distribution change over time or in response to significant events?” In this post, we summarize how non-confidential data can be used to answer these questions by providing publicly available proxies for bank-level reserves.
May 28, 2025
Who’s Paying Those Overdraft Fees?
One criticism of overdraft credit is that the fees seem borne disproportionately by low-income, Black, and Hispanic households. To investigate this concern, we surveyed around 1,000 households about their overdraft activity. Like critics, we find that these groups do tend to overdraft more often. However, when we control for respondents’ credit scores along with their socioeconomic characteristics, we discover that only their credit score predicts overdraft activity. While it’s not altogether surprising that credit constrained households overdrew more often, it’s noteworthy that socioeconomic characteristics did not help in predicting overdrafts. This more textured picture of overdraft activity helps inform the ongoing debate about overdraft credit and its users.
May 21, 2025
Nonbanks and Banks: Alone or Together?
Nonbank financial institutions (NBFIs) constitute a variety of entities—fintech companies, mutual funds, hedge funds, insurance companies, private debt providers, special purpose vehicles, among others—that have become important providers of financial intermediation services worldwide. But what is the essence of nonbank financial intermediation? Does it have any inherent advantages, and how does it interact with that performed by banks? In this Liberty Street Economics post, which is based on our recent staff report, we provide a model-based survey of recent literature on nonbank intermediation, with an emphasis on how it competes, or cooperates, with traditional banks.
May 12, 2025
Who Finances Real Sector Lenders?
The modern financial system is complex, with funding flowing not just from the financial sector to the real sector but within the financial sector through an intricate network of financial claims. While much of our work focuses on understanding the end result of these flows—credit provided to the real sector—we explore in this post how accounting for interlinkages across the financial sector changes our perception of who finances credit to the real sector.
March 31, 2025
Why Are Credit Card Rates So High?
Credit cards play a crucial role in U.S. consumer finance, with 74 percent of adults having at least one. They serve as the main method of payment for most individuals, accounting for 70 percent of retail spending. They are also the primary source of unsecured borrowing, with 60 percent of accounts carrying a balance from one month to the next. Surprisingly, credit card interest rates are very high, averaging 23 percent annually in 2023. Indeed, their rates are far higher than the rates on any other major type of loan or bond. Why are credit card rates so high? In our recent research paper, we address this question using granular account-level data on 330 million monthly credit card accounts.
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