291 posts on "Financial Markets"
February 24, 2021
State‑of‑the‑Field Conference on Cyber Risk to Financial Stability
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York partnered with Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) for the second annual State-of-the-Field Conference on Cyber Risk to Financial Stability on December 14-15, 2020. Hosted virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference took place amidst the unfolding news of a cyberattack against a major cybersecurity vendor and software vendor, underscoring vulnerabilities from cyber risk.
February 18, 2021
How Competitive are U.S. Treasury Repo Markets?
The Treasury repo market is at the center of the U.S. financial system, serving as a source of secured funding as well as providing liquidity for Treasuries in the secondary market. Recently, results published by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) raised concerns that the repo market may be dominated by as few as four banks. In this post, we show that the secured funding portion of the repo market is competitive by demonstrating that trading is not concentrated overall and explaining how the pricing of inter-dealer repo trades is available to a wide-range of market participants. By extension, rate-indexes based on repo trades, such as SOFR, reflect a deep market with a broad set of participants.
Posted at 7:00 am in Bank Capital, Banks, Financial Institutions, Financial Markets, Liquidity, Repo, Treasury | Permalink
February 5, 2021
Up on Main Street
The Main Street Lending Program was the last of the facilities launched by the Fed and Treasury to support the flow of credit during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21. The others primarily targeted Wall Street borrowers; Main Street was for smaller firms that rely more on banks for credit. It was a complicated program that worked by purchasing loans and sharing risk with lenders. Despite its delayed launch, Main Street purchased more debt than any other facility and was accelerating when it closed in January 2021. This post first locates Main Street in the constellation of COVID-19 credit programs, then looks in detail at its design and usage with an eye toward any future programs.
Posted at 7:00 am in Bank Capital, Banks, Central Bank, COVID-19 Facilities, Credit, Federal Reserve, Financial Institutions, Financial Intermediation, Financial Markets, Fiscal Policy, Monetary Policy, Pandemic | Permalink
February 3, 2021
Equity Volatility Term Premia
Investors can buy volatility hedges on the stock market using variance swaps or VIX futures. One motivation for hedging volatility is its negative relationship with the stock market. When volatility increases, stock returns tend to decline contemporaneously, a result known as the leverage effect. In this post, we measure the cost of volatility hedging by decomposing the prices of variance swaps and VIX futures into volatility forecasts and estimates of expected returns (“equity volatility term premia”) from January 1996 to June 2020.
Posted at 7:00 am in Financial Markets | Permalink
February 1, 2021
The Law of One Price in Equity Volatility Markets
Can option traders take a square root? Surprisingly, maybe not. This post shows that VIX futures prices exhibit significant deviations from their option-implied upper bounds—the square root of variance swap forward rates—thus violating the law of one price, a fundamental concept in economics and finance. The deviations widen during periods of market stress and predict the returns of VIX futures. Just as the stock market struggles with multiplication, the equity volatility market appears unable to take a square root at times.
Posted at 7:00 am in Financial Markets | Permalink
January 6, 2021
The International Spillover of U.S. Monetary Policy via Global Production Linkages
Julian di Giovanni describes work with Galina Hale that employs an empirical framework to quantify the role of the global production network in transmitting U.S. monetary policy across international stock markets.
Posted at 7:00 am in Bank Capital, Banks, Exports, Financial Markets, International Economics, Monetary Policy, Stocks, Tariffs | Permalink
December 21, 2020
What’s Up with Stocks?
“U.S. stocks are racing toward a second consecutive quarter of dramatic gains, continuing a historic stock-market recovery that few predicted in the depths of the March downturn,” said a September Wall Street Journal article. “The stock market is detached from economic reality. A reckoning is coming,” said the Washington Post. What is going on? In this post, I look not at what stocks have actually done or will do, but at what investors expected should have happened, and what they expect will happen going forward. It turns out that, at least by the particular measure of expectations I consider, investors expected stock returns to be high all along and continue to expect the same in the future.
November 30, 2020
Treasury Market When‑Issued Trading Activity
Despite the importance of when-issued trading of Treasury securities, and the advent of FINRA’s TRACE database of trading statistics, little is known publicly about the level of WI activity. In this post, the authors address this gap by analyzing WI transactions recorded in TRACE.
November 24, 2020
How Bank Reserves Are Distributed Matters. How You Measure Their Distribution Matters Too.
Changes in the distribution of banks’ reserve balances are important since they may impact conditions in the federal funds market and alter trading dynamics in money markets more generally. In this post, we propose using the Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient as a new approach to measuring reserve concentration. Since 2013, concentration, as captured by the Lorenz curve and the Gini coefficient, has co-moved with aggregate reserves, decreasing as aggregate reserves declined (such as in 2015-18) and increasing as aggregate reserves increased (such as at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic).
Posted at 7:00 am in Bank Capital, Banks, Fed Funds, Federal Reserve, Financial Markets, Inequality, Panic | Permalink
October 23, 2020
At the New York Fed: Sixth Annual Conference on the U.S. Treasury Market
On September 29, 2020, the New York Fed hosted the sixth annual Conference on the U.S. Treasury Market. The one-day event, held virtually this year, was co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve Board, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The agenda featured a number of panels and speeches on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Treasury market in March 2020, the ensuing policy response, and ways that market resiliency could be improved in light of the vulnerabilities revealed. Two speeches also touched on the ongoing transition from LIBOR to alternative reference rates.
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