73 posts on "Financial Intermediation"
April 7, 2023
How Do Interest Rates (and Depositors) Impact Measures of Bank Value?
The rapid rise in interest rates across the yield curve has increased the broader public’s interest in the exposure embedded in bank balance sheets and in depositor behavior more generally. In this post, we consider a simple illustration of the potential impact of higher interest rates on measures of bank franchise value.
Posted at 10:00 am in Bank Capital, Banks, Financial Institutions, Financial Intermediation | Permalink | Comments (1)
April 3, 2023
Monetary Policy Transmission and the Size of the Money Market Fund Industry: An Update
The size of the money market fund (MMF) industry co-moves with the monetary policy cycle. In a post published in 2019, we showed that this co-movement is likely due to the stronger response of MMF yields to monetary policy tightening relative to bank deposit rates, combined with MMF shares and bank deposits being close substitutes from an investor’s perspective. In this post, we update the analysis and zoom in to the current monetary policy tightening by the Federal Reserve.
Posted at 7:00 am in Federal Reserve, Financial Intermediation, Financial Markets, Monetary Policy | Permalink
February 6, 2023
Understanding the “Inconvenience” of U.S. Treasury Bonds
Editor’s note: Since this post was first published, a reference in the second paragraph to primary dealers switching positions was corrected to read "a net-short to a net-long position." February 6, 10:37 a.m.
The U.S. Treasury market is one of the most liquid financial markets in the world, and Treasury bonds have long been considered a safe haven for global investors. It is often believed that Treasury bonds earn a “convenience yield,” in the sense that investors are willing to accept a lower yield on them compared to other investments with the same cash flows owing to Treasury bonds’ safety and liquidity. However, since the global financial crisis (GFC), long-maturity U.S. Treasury bonds have traded at a yield consistently above the interest rate swap rate of the same maturity. The emergence of the “negative swap spread” appears to suggest that Treasury bonds are “inconvenient,” at least relative to interest rate swaps. This post dives into this Treasury “inconvenience” premium and highlights the role of dealers’ balance sheet constraints in explaining it.
Posted at 7:00 am in Financial Intermediation, Financial Markets, Treasury | Permalink | Comments (4)
February 3, 2023
How the LIBOR Transition Affects the Supply of Revolving Credit
In the United States, most commercial and industrial (C&I) lending takes the form of revolving lines of credit, known as revolvers or credit lines. For decades, like other U.S. C&I loans, credit lines were typically indexed to the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). However, since 2022, the U.S. and other developed-market economies have transitioned from credit-sensitive reference rates such as LIBOR to new risk-free rates, including the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR). This post, based on a recent New York Fed Staff Report, explores how the provision of revolving credit is likely to change as a result of the transition to a new reference rate.
Posted at 7:00 am in Banks, Credit, Financial Institutions, Financial Intermediation, Regulation | Permalink | Comments (2)
January 11, 2023
Foreign Banking Organizations in the United States and the Price of Dollar Liquidity
Foreign banking organizations (FBOs) in the United States play an important role in setting the price of short-term dollar liquidity. In this post, based on remarks given at the 2022 Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, we highlight FBOs’ activities in money markets and discuss how the availability of reserve balances affects these activities. Understanding the dynamics of FBOs’ business models and their balance sheet constraints helps us monitor the evolution of liquidity conditions during quantitative easing (QE) and tightening (QT) cycles.
Posted at 7:00 am in Banks, Central Bank, Financial Intermediation, Financial Markets, Liquidity | Permalink | Comments (1)
December 2, 2022
Does Bank Monitoring Affect Loan Repayment?
Banks monitor borrowers after originating loans to reduce moral hazard and prevent loan losses. While monitoring represents an important activity of bank business, evidence on its effect on loan repayment is scant. In this post, which is based on our recent paper, we shed light on whether bank monitoring fosters loan repayment and to what extent it does so.
July 5, 2022
The Fed’s Inaugural Conference on the International Roles of the U.S. Dollar
The U.S. dollar has played a preeminent role in the global economy since the second World War. It is used as a reserve currency and the currency of denomination for a large fraction of global trade and financial transactions. The status of the U.S. dollar engenders important considerations for the effectiveness of U.S. policy instruments and the functioning of global financial markets. These considerations include understanding potential factors that may alter the dominance of the U.S. dollar in the future, such as changes in the macroeconomic and policy environments or the development of new technologies and payment systems.
Posted at 8:02 am in Financial Intermediation, Financial Markets, International Economics | Permalink | Comments (2)
The U.S. Dollar’s Global Roles: Revisiting Where Things Stand
Will developments in technology, geopolitics, and the financial market reduce the dollar’s important roles in the global economy? This post updates prior commentary [here, here, and here], with insights about whether recent developments, such as the pandemic and the sanctions on Russia, might change the roles of the dollar. Our view is that the evidence so far points to the U.S. dollar maintaining its importance internationally. A companion post reports on the Inaugural Conference on the International Roles of the U.S. Dollar jointly organized by the Federal Reserve Board and Federal Reserve Bank of New York and held on June 16-17.
Posted at 8:00 am in Financial Intermediation, Financial Markets, International Economics | Permalink
February 17, 2022
How (Un‑)Informed Are Depositors in a Banking Panic? A Lesson from History
How informed or uninformed are bank depositors in a banking crisis? Can depositors anticipate which banks will fail? Understanding the behavior of depositors in financial crises is key to evaluating the policy measures, such as deposit insurance, designed to prevent them. But this is difficult in modern settings. The fact that bank runs are rare and deposit insurance universal implies that it is rare to be able to observe how depositors would behave in absence of the policy. Hence, as empiricists, we are lacking the counterfactual of depositor behavior during a run that is undistorted by the policy. In this blog post and the staff report on which it is based, we go back in history and study a bank run that took place in Germany in 1931 in the absence of deposit insurance for insight.
Posted at 7:00 am in Banks, Financial Institutions, Financial Intermediation, Panic, Systemic Risk | Permalink
January 31, 2022
Pricing Liquidity without Preemptive Runs
Prime money market funds (MMFs) are vulnerable to runs. This was dramatically illustrated in September 2008 and March 2020, when massive outflows from prime MMFs worsened stress in the short-term funding markets and eased only after taxpayer-supported interventions by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. In this post, we describe how mechanisms like swing pricing that charge a price for liquidity can reduce the vulnerability of prime MMFs without triggering preemptive runs.
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