255 posts on "Financial Institutions"
February 22, 2017
Getting More from the Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey?
Every quarter, senior loan officers at selected large banks around the United States are asked by Fed economists how their standards for approving business loans changed compared with the quarter before. Of all the questions in the Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey (SLOOS), responses to that question about standards usually attract the most attention from the financial press and researchers. Relatively ignored by comparison are loan officers’ reports on how they changed interest spreads, collateral requirements, and other terms on loans they are willing to approve. Lenders can clearly expand or contract credit by altering those terms even without changing their standards for approving loans, so we investigate whether the reports on loan terms collected in the SLOOS are also informative.
February 13, 2017
How Resilient Is the U.S. Housing Market Now?
Housing is by far the most important asset for most households, and, not coincidentally, housing debt dwarfs other household liabilities. The relationship between housing debt and housing values figures significantly in financial and macroeconomic stability, as events during the housing bust of 2006-12 clearly demonstrated. This week, Liberty Street Economics presents five posts touching on various aspects of housing, from the changing relationship between mortgage debt and housing equity to the future of homeownership. In today’s post, we provide estimates of housing equity and explore how vulnerable households are to declines in house prices, using methods introduced in our paper “Tracking and Stress Testing U.S. Household Leverage.”
Posted at 7:00 am in Financial Institutions, Household Finance, Macroeconomics | Permalink | Comments (1)
December 19, 2016
Investigating the Proposed Overnight Treasury GC Repo Benchmark Rates
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.
December 5, 2016
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 […]
Posted at 7:00 am in Financial Institutions, Financial Markets, Regulation | Permalink | Comments (3)
November 18, 2016
The Final Crisis Chronicle: The Panic of 1907 and the Birth of the Fed
The panic of 1907 was among the most severe we’ve covered in our series and also the most transformative, as it led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System. Also known as the “Knickerbocker Crisis,” the panic of 1907 shares features with the 2007-08 crisis, including “shadow banks” in the form high-flying, less-regulated trusts operating beyond the safety net of the time, and a pivotal “Lehman moment” when Knickerbocker Trust, the second-largest trust in the country, was allowed to fail after J.P. Morgan refused to save it.
Posted at 7:00 am in Crisis, Economic History, Financial Institutions, Financial Markets, Regulation, Treasury | Permalink
October 24, 2016
Are Banks Being Roiled by Oil?
Profits and employment in the oil and natural gas extraction industry have fallen significantly since 2014, reflecting a sustained decline in energy prices. In this post, we look at how these tremors are affecting banks that operate in energy industry–intensive regions of the United States. We find that banks in the “oil patch” have experienced a significant rise in delinquencies on commercial and industrial loans. So far though, there appears to be limited evidence of spillovers to other types of loans and no evidence of widespread bank losses or failures in these regions.
October 21, 2016
From the Vault: Funds, Flight, and Financial Stability
The money market industry is in the midst of significant change. With the implementation this month of new Securities and Exchange Commission rules designed to make money market funds (MMFs) more resilient to stress, institutional prime and tax-exempt funds must report more accurate prices reflecting the net asset value (NAV) of shares based on market prices for the funds’ asset holdings, rather than promising a fixed NAV of $1 per share. The rules also permit prime funds, which invest in a mixture of corporate debt, certificates of deposit, and repurchase agreements, to impose fees or set limits on investors who redeem shares when market conditions sharply deteriorate. (Funds investing in government securities, which are more stable, are not subject to the new rules.) These changes, driven by a run on MMFs at the height of the financial crisis, add to earlier risk-limiting rules on portfolio holdings.
Posted at 7:00 am in Financial Institutions, Financial Markets, Regulation | Permalink | Comments (1)
October 12, 2016
Let the Light In: How Financial Reporting and Transparency Improve Corporate Governance
Financial reporting is valuable because corporate governance—which we view as the set of contracts that help align managers’ interests with those of shareholders—can be more efficient when the parties commit themselves to a more transparent information environment. This is a key theme in our article The Role of Financial Reporting and Transparency in Corporate Governance, which reviews recent literature on the part played by financial reporting in resolving agency conflicts among managers, directors, and shareholders. In this post, we highlight some of the governance issues and recommendations discussed in the article, and we focus on how information asymmetries can create agency conflicts.
October 7, 2016
At the N.Y. Fed: Workshops and New Research on Improving Bank Culture and Governance
The New York Fed takes bank culture and governance seriously. As Bank President William Dudley said at a 2014 workshop convening policymakers and industry participants improving the culture and governance of banks is “an imperative,” both to ensure financial stability and to deepen public trust in our financial system. The Bank built on that first workshop with a second in November 2015 and will host a third event later this month, on October 20.
October 3, 2016
Fear of $10 Billion
Ten billion has become a big number in banking since the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. When banks’ assets exceed that threshold, they face considerably heightened supervision and regulation, including exams by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, caps on interchange fees, and annual stress tests. There are plenty of anecdotes about banks avoiding the $10 billion threshold or waiting to cross with a big merger, but we’ve seen no systematic evidence of this avoidance behavior. We provide some supporting evidence below and then discuss the implications for size-based bank regulation—where compliance costs ratchet up with size—more generally.
Posted at 7:00 am in Financial Institutions | Permalink
RSS Feed
Follow Liberty Street Economics
