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255 posts on "Financial Institutions"
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.

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.

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.

May 4, 2016

Why Dealers Trade in GCF Repo®

Analysis using confidential market data shows that the majority of individual dealers follow consistent strategies in GCF Repo, where dealers are net borrowers or lenders on almost every day that they are active.

April 18, 2016

What’s behind the March Spike in Treasury Fails?

Michael J. Fleming and Frank M. Keane U.S. Treasury security settlement fails—whereby market participants are unable to make delivery of securities to complete transactions—spiked in March 2016 to their highest level since the financial crisis. As noted in this post, fails delay the settlement of transactions and can therefore lead to illiquidity, create operational risk, […]

April 14, 2016

A Peek behind the Curtain of Bank Supervision

Since the financial crisis, bank regulatory and supervisory policies have changed dramatically both in the United States (Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act) and abroad (Third Basel Accord).

April 13, 2016

How Does Supervision Affect Banks?

Supervisors monitor banks to assess the banks’ compliance with rules and regulations but also to ensure that they engage in safe and sound practices.

April 12, 2016

The Economics of Bank Supervision: So Much to Do, So Little Time

Thomas M. Eisenbach, David O. Lucca, and Robert M. Townsend While bank regulation and supervision are the two main components of banking policy, the difference between them is often overlooked and the details of supervision can appear shrouded in secrecy. In this post, which is based on a recent staff report, we provide a framework […]

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