The Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility
To prevent outflows from prime and muni funds from turning into an industry-wide run after the COVID-19 outbreak, the Federal Reserve established Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility. This post looks at the Fed’s intervention, its goals, and the direct and indirect market effects.
How Does Supervision Affect Bank Performance during Downturns?
New research finds that there is a cyclical nature to the benefits of bank supervisory attention: in normal times, the benefits are smaller, but during downturns the more closely supervised banks exhibit better loan performance and lower earnings volatility.
The Value of Opacity in a Banking Crisis
During crisis periods, we often observe regulators limiting access to bank‑level information with the goal of restoring the public’s confidence in banks. Thus, information management often plays a central role in ending financial crises. Despite the perceived importance of managing information about individual banks during a financial crisis, we are not aware of any empirical work that quantifies the effect of such policies. In this blog post, we highlight results from our recent working paper, demonstrating that in a crisis, a policy of suppressing information about banks’ balance sheets has a significant and positive effect on deposits.
Understanding Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian Models: Insights from a PRANK
To shed light on the macroeconomic consequences of heterogeneity, Acharya and Dogra develop a stylized HANK model that contains key features present in more complicated HANK models.
Have the Risk Profiles of Large U.S. Bank Holding Companies Changed?
After the global financial crisis, regulatory changes were implemented to support financial stability, with some changes directly addressing capital and liquidity in bank holding companies (BHCs) and others targeting BHC size and complexity. Although the overall size of the largest U.S. BHCs has not decreased since the crisis, the organizational complexity of these same organizations has declined, with less notable changes being observed in their range of businesses and geographic scope (Goldberg and Meehl forthcoming). In this post, we explore how different types of BHC risks—risks that can influence the probability that a BHC is stressed, as well as the chance of systemic implications—have changed over time. The results are mixed: Levels of most BHC risks currently tend to be higher than in the years immediately preceding the crisis, but are markedly lower than the levels seen during and immediately following the crisis.
Banking System Vulnerability: Annual Update
A key part of understanding the stability of the U.S. financial system is to monitor leverage and funding risks in the financial sector and the way in which these vulnerabilities interact to amplify negative shocks. In this post, we provide an update of four analytical models, introduced in a Liberty Street Economics post last year, that aim to capture different aspects of banking system vulnerability.
Selection in Banking
Over the past thirty years, more than 2,900 U.S. banks have transformed from pure depository institutions into conglomerates involved in a broad range of business activities. What type of banks choose to become conglomerate organizations? In this post, we document that, from 1986 to 2018, such institutions had, on average, a higher return on equity in the three years prior to their decision to expand, as well as a lower level of risk overall. However, this superior pre-expansion performance diminishes over time, and all but disappears by the end of the 1990s.
Monetary Policy Transmission and the Size of the Money Market Fund Industry
Assets under management (AUM) of retail money market funds (MMF) have soared during monetary policy tightening episodes, lagging the spread between MMF yields and CD rates.
The Side Effects of Shadow Banking on Liquidity Provision
Over the past two decades, the growth of shadow banking has transformed the way the U.S. banking system funds corporations. In this post, we describe how this growth has affected both the term loan and credit line businesses, and how the changes have resulted in a reduction in the liquidity insurance provided to firms.
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