82 posts on "Liquidity"
February 22, 2021
Measuring the Forest through the Trees: The Corporate Bond Market Distress Index
With more than $6 trillion outstanding, the U.S. corporate bond market is a significant source of funding for most large U.S. corporations. While prior literature offers a variety of measures to capture different aspects of corporate bond market functioning, there is little consensus on how to use those measures to identify periods of distress in the market as a whole. In this post, we describe the U.S. Corporate Bond Market Distress Index (CMDI), which offers a single measure to quantify joint dislocations in the primary and secondary corporate bond markets. As detailed in a new working paper, the index provides more salient information about the state of the corporate bond market relative to common measures of financial stress, thereby more accurately identifying periods of widespread dislocation in the market.
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 Balance of Payments, Bank Capital, Banks, Dealers, Financial Institutions, Financial Markets, Liquidity, Repo, Treasury | Permalink
October 21, 2020
Bank Capital, Loan Liquidity, and Credit Standards since the Global Financial Crisis
Did the 2007-09 financial crisis or the regulatory reforms that followed alter how banks change their underwriting standards over the course of the business cycle? We provide some simple, “narrative” evidence on that question by studying the reasons banks cite when they report a change in commercial credit standards in the Federal Reserve’s Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey. We find that the economic outlook, risk tolerance, and other real factors generally drive standards more than financial factors such as bank capital and loan market liquidity. Those financial factors have mattered more since the crisis, however, and their importance increased further as post-crisis reforms were phased in in the middle of the following decade.
September 22, 2020
Expanding the Toolkit: Facilities Established to Respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic
Anna Kovner and Antoine Martin argue that the “credit” and lending facilities established by the Fed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, while unprecedented, are a natural extension of the central bank’s existing toolkit.
Posted at 7:00 am in Central Bank, Crisis, Federal Reserve, Liquidity, Monetary Policy, Pandemic | Permalink
August 24, 2020
Explaining the Puzzling Behavior of Short-Term Money Market Rates
Since 2008, the Federal Reserve has dramatically increased the supply of bank reserves, effectively adopting a floor system for monetary policy implementation. Since then, the behavior of short-term money market rates has been at times puzzling. In particular, short-term rates have been surprisingly firm in recent months, despite the large increase in reserves by the Fed as a part of its response to the coronavirus pandemic. In this post, we provide evidence that both the supply of reserves and the supply of short-term Treasury securities are important factors for explaining short-term rates.
July 7, 2020
A New Reserves Regime? COVID-19 and the Federal Reserve Balance Sheet
Aggregate reserves declined from nearly $3 trillion in August 2014 to $1.4 trillion in mid-September 2019, as the Federal Reserve normalized its balance sheet. This decline came to a halt in September 2019 when the Federal Reserve responded to turmoil in short-term money markets, with reserves fluctuating around $1.6 trillion in the early months of 2020. Then, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve dramatically expanded its balance sheet, both directly, through outright purchases and repurchase agreements, and indirectly, as a consequence of the facilities to support market functioning and the flow of credit to the real economy. In this post, we characterize the increase in reserves between March and June 2020, describing changes to the distribution and concentration of reserves.
Posted at 7:00 am in Fed Funds, Federal Reserve, Fiscal Policy, Liquidity, Monetary Policy, Pandemic | Permalink
June 16, 2020
Outflows from Bank-Loan Funds during COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has put significant pressure on debt markets, especially those populated by riskier borrowers. The leveraged loan market, in particular, came under remarkable stress during the month of March. Bank-loan mutual funds, among the main holders of leveraged loans, suffered massive outflows that were reminiscent of the outflows they experienced during the 2008 crisis. In this post, we show that the flow sensitivity of the loan-fund industry to the COVID-19 crisis (and to negative shocks more generally) seems to be even greater than that of high-yield bond funds, which also invest in high-risk debt securities and have received much attention because of their possible exposure to run-like behavior by investors and their implications for financial stability.
Posted at 7:00 am in Crisis, Financial Institutions, Financial Intermediation, Liquidity, Pandemic | Permalink | Comments (2)
May 19, 2020
The Primary Dealer Credit Facility
On March 17, 2020, the Federal Reserve announced that it would re-establish the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) to allow primary dealers to support smooth market functioning and facilitate the availability of credit to businesses and households. The PDCF started offering overnight and term funding with maturities of up to ninety days on March 20. It will be in place for at least six months and may be extended as conditions warrant. In this post, we provide an overview of the PDCF and its usage to date.
Posted at 7:00 am in Bank Capital, Banks, Central Bank, COVID-19 Facilities, Credit, Federal Reserve, Liquidity, Monetary Policy, Pandemic, Systemic Risk | Permalink
May 15, 2020
The Commercial Paper Funding Facility
This post documents dislocations in the commercial paper market following the COVID-19 outbreak that motivated the Fed to create the Commercial Paper Funding Facility, and tracks the subsequent improvement in market conditions.
Posted at 7:00 am in Central Bank, Corporate Finance, COVID-19 Facilities, Federal Reserve, Financial Markets, Liquidity, Pandemic | Permalink
May 8, 2020
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.
Posted at 7:00 am in Central Bank, COVID-19 Facilities, Credit, Federal Reserve, Financial Institutions, Financial Intermediation, Financial Markets, Liquidity, Monetary Policy, Pandemic | Permalink
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