260 posts on "Financial Institutions"
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
July 8, 2016
Hey, Economist! Why—and When—Did the Treasury Embrace Regular and Predictable Issuance?
Few people know the Treasury market from as many angles as Ken Garbade, a senior vice president in the Money and Payments Studies area of the New York Fed’s Research Group. Ken taught financial markets at NYU’s graduate school of business for many years before heading to Wall Street to assume a position in the research department of the primary dealer division of Bankers Trust Company. At Bankers, Ken conducted relative-value research on the Treasury market, assessing how return varies relative to risk for particular Treasury securities. For a time, he also traded single-payment Treasury obligations known as STRIPS—although not especially successfully, he notes.
Posted at 7:00 am in Economic History, Fed Funds, Financial Institutions, Fiscal Policy, Hey, Economist!, Treasury | Permalink
June 20, 2016
Risky Business: Government Mortgage Insurance Programs
W. Scott Frame, Kristopher Gerardi, and Joseph Tracy Editors’ note: The column headings in the final table in this post have been corrected from an earlier version. Homeownership has long been a U.S. public policy goal. One of the many ways that the federal government subsidizes homeownership is through mortgage insurance programs operated by the […]
June 3, 2016
At the N.Y. Fed: The Transatlantic Economy: Convergence or Divergence?
On April 18, 2016, the New York Fed hosted a conference on current and future policy directions for the linked economies of Europe and the United States. “The Transatlantic Economy: Convergence or Divergence,” organized jointly with the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the European Commission, brought together U.S. and Europe-based policymakers, regulators, and academics to discuss a series of important issues: Are the economies of the euro area and the United States on a convergent or divergent path? Are financial regulatory reforms making the banking and financial structures more similar? Will this imply a convergence in macroprudential policies? Which instruments do the United States and the euro area have at their disposal to raise investment, spur productivity, and avoid secular stagnation? In this post, we summarize the principal themes and findings of the conference discussion.
Posted at 7:00 am in Euro Area, Fed Funds, Financial Institutions, International Economics, Monetary Policy, Regulation | Permalink
May 16, 2016
Did the Supervisory Guidance on Leveraged Lending Work?
Financial regulatory agencies issued guidance intended to curtail leveraged lending—loans to firms perceived to be risky—in March of 2013. In issuing the guidance, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation highlighted several facts that were reminiscent of the mortgage market in the years preceding the financial crisis: rapid growth in the volume of leveraged lending, increased participation by unregulated investors, and deteriorating underwriting standards. Our post shows that banks, in particular the largest institutions, cut leveraged lending while nonbanks increased such lending after the guidance. During the same period of time, nonbanks increased their borrowing from banks, possibly to finance their growing leveraged lending activity.
May 5, 2016
Borrowing, Lending, and Swapping Collateral in GCF Repo®
By Marco Cipriani and Adam Copeland In the third post in this series, we examined GCF Repo® traders’ end-of-day strategies. In this final post, we further our understanding of dealers’ behavior by looking at their trading pattern within the day.
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