Once Upon a Time in the Banking Sector: Historical Insights into Banking Competition

Mark Carlson, Sergio Correia, and Stephan Luck




How does competition among banks affect credit growth and real economic growth? In addition, how does it affect financial stability? In this blog post, we derive insights into this important set of questions from novel data on the U.S. banking system during the nineteenth century.

How Do Large Banks Manage Their Cash?

Jeffrey Levine and Asani Sarkar

Second of two posts

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.

Large Bank Cash Balances and Liquidity Regulations

Jeffrey Levine and Asani Sarkar

Update (9 a.m.): An earlier version of this post transposed line labels in the first figure. The error has been corrected.

First of two posts

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has recently communicated its aim to continue implementing monetary policy in a regime that maintains an ample supply of reserves, though with a significantly lower level of reserves than has prevailed in recent years. The liquidity needs of the largest U.S. commercial banks play an important role in understanding the banking system’s appetite for actual reserve holdings, which we refer to as bank reserve demand. In this post, we discuss the recent evolution of large bank cash balances and the effect of liquidity regulations on these balances. In part two of this series, we provide new evidence on how the largest banks manage their liquidity needs on a daily basis.

From Policy Rates to Market Rates—Untangling the U.S. Dollar Funding Market

Gara Afonso, Fabiola Ravazzolo, and Alessandro Zori



How do changes in the rate that the Federal Reserve pays on reserves held by depository institutions affect rates in money markets in which the Fed does not participate? Through which channels do changes in the so-called administered rates reach rates in onshore and offshore U.S. dollar money markets? In this post, we answer these questions with the help of an interactive map that guides us through the web of interconnected relationships between the Fed, key market players, and the various instruments in the U.S. dollar funding market, highlighting the linkages across the short-term financial products that form this market.

How Large Are Default Spillovers in the U.S. Financial System?

Fernando M. Duarte, Collin Jones, and Francisco Ruela

Second of two posts

When a financial firm suffers sufficiently high losses, it might default on its counterparties, who may in turn become unable to pay their own creditors, and so on. This “domino” or “cascade” effect can quickly propagate through the financial system, creating undesirable spillovers and unnecessary defaults. In this post, we use the framework that we discussed in “Assessing Contagion Risk in a Financial Network,” the first part of this two-part series, to answer the question: How vulnerable is the U.S. financial system to default spillovers?

Assessing Contagion Risk in a Financial Network

Fernando M. Duarte, Collin Jones, and Francisco Ruela

First of two posts

In compiling a list of key takeaways of the 2008 financial crisis, surely the dangers of counterparty risk would be near the top. During the crisis, speculation on which financial institution would be next to default on its obligations to creditors, and which one would come after that, dominated news cycles. Since then, there has been an explosion in research trying to understand and quantify the default spillovers that can arise through counterparty risk. This is the first of two posts delving into the analysis of financial network contagion through this spillover channel. Here we introduce a framework that is useful for thinking about default cascades, originally developed by Eisenberg and Noe.

Is There Too Much Business Debt?

Anna Kovner and Brandon Zborowski



By many measures nonfinancial corporate debt has been increasing as a share of GDP and assets since 2010. As the May Federal Reserve Financial Stability Report explained, high business debt can be a financial stability risk because heavily indebted corporations may need to cut back spending more sharply when shocks occur. Further, when businesses cannot repay their loans, financial institutions and investors incur losses. In this post, we review measures of corporate leverage in the United States. Although corporate debt has soared, concerns about debt growth are mitigated in part by higher corporate cash flows.

Understanding Cyber Risk: Lessons from a Recent Fed Workshop

Gara Afonso, Filippo Curti, Ping McLemore, and Atanas Mihov



Cyber risk poses a major threat to financial stability, yet financial institutions still lack consensus on the definition of and terminology around cyber risk and have no common framework for confronting these hazards. This impedes efforts to measure and manage such risk, diminishing institutions’ individual and collective readiness to handle system-level cyber threats. In this blog post, we describe the proceedings of a recent workshop where leading risk managers, academics, and policy makers gathered to discuss proposals for countering cyber risk. This workshop is part of a joint two-phase initiative run by the Federal Reserve Banks of Richmond and New York and the Fed’s Board of Governors to harmonize cyber risk identification, classification, and measurement practices.

Ten Years Later—Did QE Work?

Stephan Luck and Thomas Zimmermann




By November 2008, the Global Financial Crisis, which originated in the residential housing market and the shadow banking system, had begun to turn into a major recession, spurring the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to initiate what we now refer to as quantitative easing (QE). In this blog post, we draw upon the empirical findings of post-crisis academic research–including our own work–to shed light on the question: Did QE work?

Is the Recent Tax Reform Playing a Role in the Decline of Home Sales?

Richard Peach and Casey McQuillan

HOUSING SERIES: Post 4 of 5

From the fourth quarter of 2017 through the third quarter of 2018, the average contract interest rate on new thirty-year fixed rate mortgages rose by roughly 70 basis points—from 3.9 percent to 4.6 percent. During this same period, there was a broad-based slowing in housing market activity with sales of new single-family homes declining by 7.6 percent while sales of existing single-family homes fell by 4.6 percent. Interestingly though, these declines in home sales were larger than in the two previous episodes when mortgage interest rates rose by a comparable amount. This post considers whether provisions in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) might have also contributed to the recent decline in housing market activity.