304 posts on "Financial Markets"
January 7, 2026
What Is a Carbon Tariff and Why Is the EU Imposing One?
The European Union has been an early adopter of carbon policies, with the introduction of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) in 2005. This scheme sets a common price for carbon and is applied to the most polluting manufacturing sectors. By increasing the cost of emissions-intensive production, the system incentivizes firms to decrease their use of fossil fuels. However, as we show in a companion post, the policy’s impact was moderated by firms increasing their reliance on high-emissions imports. To eliminate this workaround, the EU will expand the ETS to imports in 2026, through the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). The CBAM will essentially put a tariff on imported goods based on their carbon content. Our recent work provides a quantitative analysis of how the ETS and CBAM affect firms’ supply choice decisions, and the resulting changes in domestic prices and emissions.
What Can Undermine a Carbon Tax?
Several countries have implemented a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system to establish high carbon prices and create a disincentive for the use of fossil fuels. Essentially, the tax encourages firms to substitute toward low carbon emission energy. Costs also rise for firms down the supply chain that use production inputs with high-emission content, so the total impact of a carbon tax can be large. In practice, however, firms also have an incentive to find an offset to a carbon tax. In this post, based on our recent work, we present evidence of one such adaptation strategy. We show that French firms increased their imports of high-emission inputs from suppliers outside the European Union’s cap-and-trade system, known as the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), reducing the effectiveness of this approach to cutting carbon emissions—an adaptation strategy that leads to “carbon leakage.” To help stop this leakage, the EU is implementing a “carbon tariff” in 2026, which is the topic of a companion post.
November 12, 2025
How Has Treasury Market Liquidity Fared in 2025?
In 2025, the Federal Reserve has cut interest rates, trade policy has shifted abruptly, and economic policy uncertainty has increased. How have these developments affected the functioning of the key U.S. Treasury securities market? In this post, we return to some familiar metrics to assess the recent behavior of Treasury market liquidity. We find that liquidity briefly worsened around the April 2025 tariff announcements but that its relation to Treasury volatility has been similar to what it was in the past.
October 9, 2025
End‑of‑Month Activity Across the Treasury Market
In a 2024 post, we showed that interdealer trading in benchmark U.S. Treasury notes and bonds concentrates on the last trading day of the month, likely due to passive investment funds’ turn-of-month portfolio rebalancing. In this post, we extend our trading activity analysis to the full range of Treasury securities and market segments. We find that trading is even more concentrated on the last trading day of the month for other types of Treasury securities and in the dealer-to-customer segment of the market, with trading volume in off-the-run Treasuries twice as high as on other days, on average.
Posted at 7:00 am in Financial Markets | Permalink
October 8, 2025
The Rise of Sponsored Service for Clearing Repo
Recently instituted rule amendments have initiated a large migration of dealer-to-client Treasury repurchase trades to central clearing. To date, the main avenue used to access central clearing is Sponsored Service, a clearing product that has, until now, received little attention. This post highlights the results from a recent Staff Report which presents a deep dive into Sponsored Service. Here, we summarize the description of the institutional details of this service and its costs and benefits. We then document some basic facts on how market participants use this service, based on confidential data.
July 8, 2025
The Fed’s Treasury Purchase Prices During the Pandemic
In March 2020, the Federal Reserve commenced purchases of U.S. Treasury securities to address the market disruptions caused by the pandemic. This post assesses the execution quality of those purchases by comparing the Fed’s purchase prices to contemporaneous market prices. Although past work has considered this question in the context of earlier asset purchases, the market dysfunction spurred by the pandemic means that execution quality at that time may have differed. Indeed, we find that the Fed’s execution quality was unusually good in 2020 in that the Fed bought Treasuries at prices appreciably lower than prevailing market offer prices.
July 7, 2025
The Zero Lower Bound Remains a Medium‑Term Risk
Interest rates have fluctuated significantly over time. After a period of high inflation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, interest rates entered a decline that lasted for nearly four decades. The federal funds rate—the primary tool for monetary policy in the United States—followed this trend, while also varying with cycles of economic recessions and expansions.
April 23, 2025
Stablecoins and Crypto Shocks: An Update
Stablecoins are crypto assets whose value is pegged to that of a fiat currency, usually the U.S. dollar. In our first Liberty Street Economics post, we described the rapid growth of stablecoins, the different types of stablecoin arrangements, and the May 2022 run on TerraUSD, the fourth largest stablecoin at the time. In a subsequent post, we estimated the impact of large declines in the price of bitcoin on cumulative net flows into stablecoins and showed the existence of flight-to-safety dynamics similar to those observed in money market mutual funds during periods of stress. In this post, we document the growth of stablecoins since 2019, including the evolution of the reported collateral backing major stablecoins. Then, we estimate the impact on the stablecoin industry of large bitcoin price increases that occurred between 2021 and 2025.
October 21, 2024
The Dueling Intraday Demands on Reserves
A central use of reserves held at Federal Reserve Banks (FRBs) is for the settlement of interbank obligations. These obligations are substantial—the average daily total reserves used on two main settlement systems, Fedwire Funds and Fedwire Securities, exceeds $6.5 trillion. The total amount of reserves needed to efficiently settle these obligations is an active area of debate, especially as the Federal Reserve’s current quantitative tightening (QT) policy seeks to drain reserves from the financial system. To better understand the use of reserves, in this post we examine the intraday flows of reserves over Fedwire Funds and Fedwire Securities and show that the mechanics of each settlement system result in starkly different intraday demands on reserves and differing sensitivities of those intraday demands to the total amount of reserves in the financial system.
October 10, 2024
International Stock Markets’ Reactions to EU Climate Policy Shocks
While policies to combat climate change are designed to address a global problem, they are generally implemented at the national level. Nevertheless, the impact of domestic climate policies may spill over internationally given countries’ economic and financial interdependence. For example, a carbon tax charged to domestic firms for their use of fossil fuels may lead the firms to charge higher prices to their domestic and foreign customers; given the importance of global value chains in modern economies, the impact of that carbon tax may propagate across multiple layers of cross-border production linkages. In this post, we quantify the spillover effects of climate policies on forward-looking asset prices globally by estimating the impact of carbon price shocks in the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) on stock prices across a broad set of country-industry pairs. In other words, we measure how asset markets evaluate the impact of changes to the carbon price on growth and profitability prospects of the firms.
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