From the Vault: Does Forward Guidance Work?

Anna Snider

In recent months, there have been some high-profile assessments of how far the Federal Reserve has come in terms of communicating about monetary policy since its “secrets of the temple” days. While observers say the transition to greater transparency “still seems to be a work in progress,” they note the range of steps the Fed has taken over the years to shed light on its strategy, including issuing statements to announce and explain policy changes following Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings, post-meeting press conferences and minutes, FOMC-member speeches and testimony, and “forward guidance” in all its variants.

Forecasting Interest Rates over the Long Run

Tobias Adrian, Richard Crump, Peter Diamond, and Rui Yu



In a previous post, we showed how market rates on U.S. Treasuries violate the expectations hypothesis because of time-varying risk premia. In this post, we provide evidence that term structure models have outperformed direct market-based measures in forecasting interest rates. This suggests that term structure models can play a role in long-run planning for public policy objectives such as assessing the viability of Social Security.

Hey, Economist! Why—and When—Did the Treasury Embrace Regular and Predictable Issuance?

A Conversation with Ken Garbade



Few people know the Treasury market from as many angles as Ken Garbade, a senior vice president in the Money and Payments Studies area of the New York Fed’s Research Group. Ken taught financial markets at NYU’s graduate school of business for many years before heading to Wall Street to assume a position in the research department of the primary dealer division of Bankers Trust Company. At Bankers, Ken conducted relative-value research on the Treasury market, assessing how return varies relative to risk for particular Treasury securities. For a time, he also traded single-payment Treasury obligations known as STRIPS—although not especially successfully, he notes.

High-Frequency Cross-Market Trading and Market Volatility

Dobrislav Dobrev and Ernst Schaumburg



The close relationship between market volatility and trading activity is a long-established fact in financial markets. In recent years, much of the trading in U.S. Treasury and equity markets has been associated with nearly simultaneous trading between the leading cash and futures platforms. The striking cross-activity patterns that arise in both high-frequency cross-market trading and related cross-market order book changes in U.S. Treasury markets are also witnessed in other asset classes and naturally lead to the question that we investigate in this post of how the cross-market component of overall trading activity is related to volatility.

The Workup, Technology, and Price Discovery in the Interdealer Market for U.S. Treasury Securities

Ernst Schaumburg and Ron Yang



The interdealer market for Treasury securities shares many features with other highly liquid markets that trade electronically using anonymous central limit order books. The interdealer Treasury market, however, contains a unique trading protocol, the so-called workup, that accounts for the majority of interdealer trading volume. While the workup is designed to enhance liquidity in a market with diverse participation, it may also delay certain price-improving order book adjustments and therefore affect price discovery. In this post, we exploit the tight relationship between the ten-year Treasury note traded on the BrokerTec platform and the corresponding Treasury futures contract to explore how the workup protocol affects trading in the interdealer market and to highlight the impact of technological changes on observed trading behaviors.

Primary Dealer Participation in the Secondary U.S. Treasury Market

Michael Fleming, Frank Keane, and Ernst Schaumburg



The recent Joint Staff Report on October 15, 2014, exploring an episode of unprecedented volatility in the U.S. Treasury market, revealed that primary dealers no longer account for most trading volume on the interdealer brokerage (IDB) platforms. This shift is noteworthy because dealers contribute to long-term liquidity provision via their willingness to hold positions across days. However, a large share of Treasury security trading occurs elsewhere, in the dealer-to-customer (DtC) market. In this post, we show that primary dealers maintain a majority share of secondary market trading volume when DtC trading is taken into account. We also use survey data on large dealers to characterize activity in the DtC market and discuss some of the gaps in the available Treasury trading volume data.

Is Treasury Market Liquidity Becoming More Concentrated?

Michael Fleming




In an earlier post, we showed that Treasury market liquidity appears reasonably good by historical standards. That analysis focused on the most liquid benchmark securities, largely because data availability is best for those securities. However, some studies, such as this one and this one, report that market liquidity is concentrating in the most liquid securities at the expense of the less liquid, so that looking only at the benchmark securities gives a misleading impression. In this post, I look at trading volume information reported by the Federal Reserve to test whether liquidity is becoming more concentrated.

Characterizing the Rising Settlement Fails in Seasoned Treasury Securities

Michael Fleming and Frank Keane

Note: Updated versions of the charts in this post showing data through March 31, 2016, can be viewed here.

In a 2014 post, we described what settlement fails are, why they arise and matter, and how they can be measured. A subsequent post explored the determinants of the increased volume of U.S. Treasury security settlement fails in June 2014. Part of that episode reflected a steady increase in settlement fails of seasoned securities. In this post, we explore the characteristics of seasoned fails in recent years, in order to better understand the risks associated with such fails.

Dealer Positioning and Expected Returns

Tobias Adrian, Michael Fleming, and Erik Vogt



Securities broker-dealers (dealers) trade securities on behalf of their customers and themselves. Recently, analysts have pointed to the decline in U.S. dealers’ corporate bond inventories as evidence that dealers’ market making capacity is impaired. However, historically such inventories also reflect dealers’ risk management and proprietary trading activities. In this post, we take a long-term perspective on the evolution of dealers’ inventories of corporate bonds, Treasuries, and other debt securities and relate those inventories to expected returns in fixed-income markets in an effort to better understand the drivers of dealer positioning.

At the New York Fed: Conference on the Evolving Structure of the U.S. Treasury Market

Michael Fleming, Frank Keane, Michael McMorrow, Ernst Schaumburg, and Nathaniel Wuerffel



The New York Fed recently hosted a two-day conference on the evolving structure of the U.S. Treasury market, co-sponsored with the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve Board, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The events of October 15, 2014, when yields experienced an unusually high level of volatility and a rapid round-trip in prices without a clear cause, underscored the need to better understand the factors that affect the liquidity and functioning of this important market.