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Journal Article
On the fundamental reasons for bank fragility
A substantial body of literature has now developed as a result of efforts to identify the fundamental reasons for the fragility of financial intermediaries in the Diamond-Dybvig theory of banking. Many of these articles focus on the interaction between sequential service and uncertainty about the aggregate need for liquidity in the economy. The articles in this literature are inevitably technical and focus somewhat narrowly on the implications of specific assumptions. Here, we provide a more accessible discussion of the main ideas and findings in this literature. Our discussion can be used as ...
Working Paper
Should Central Banks Issue Digital Currency?
We study how the introduction of a central bank-issued digital currency affects interest rates, the level of economic activity, and welfare in an environment where both central bank money and private bank deposits are used in exchange. Banks in our model are financially constrained, and the liquidity premium on bank deposits affects the level of aggregate investment. We study the optimal design of a digital currency in this setting, including whether it should pay interest and how widely it should circulate. We highlight an important policy tradeoff: while a digital currency tends to promote ...
Working Paper
Bank runs and institutions : the perils of intervention
Governments typically respond to a run on the banking system by temporarily freezing deposits and by rescheduling payments to depositors. Depositors may even be required to demonstrate an urgent need for funds before being allowed to withdraw. We study ex post efficient policy responses to a bank run and the ex ante incentives these responses create. Given that a run is underway, the efficient response is typically not to freeze all remaining deposits, since this would impose heavy costs on individuals with urgent withdrawal needs. Instead, (benevolent) government institutions would allow ...
Journal Article
Divorcing money from monetary policy
Many central banks implement monetary policy in a way that maintains a tight link between the stock of money and the short-term interest rate. In particular, their implementation procedures require that the supply of reserve balances be set precisely in order to implement the target interest rate. Because bank reserves play other key roles in the economy, this link can create tensions with other important objectives, especially in times of acute market stress. This article considers an alternative approach to monetary policy implementation -- known as a "floor system" -- that can reduce ...
Journal Article
Dollarization as a monetary arrangement for emerging market economies
Official dollarization refers to the adoption of the U.S. dollar as legal tender in place of the national currency. Some Latin American countries have recently dollarized, and others have seriously considered dollarization. This article discusses the reasons behind the surge of interest in dollarization and provides a review of the new academic literature on the topic. It discusses in detail some of the factors that are commonly considered to be the important costs and benefits of dollarizing. The paper also provides an analysis of the existing liability dollarization in several countries and ...
Discussion Paper
Cash Assets of Foreign Banks: An Example of Seasonal Adjustment Gone Awry
Federal Reserve Statistical Release H.8 provides aggregate data on the assets and liabilities of commercial banks in the United States. Two types of data are provided: one in which each series is adjusted to offset regular, seasonal movements, and another in which no adjustment is made. Recently, a striking pattern has emerged in one particular data series: the cash assets of foreign-related banking institutions.[1] In the seasonally adjusted data, this value has fallen 36 percent since its peak in June 2011?a sharp movement that has generated concern among market observers. The nonseasonally ...
Report
Expectations and contagion in self-fulfilling currency attacks
This paper presents a model in which currency crises can spread across countries as a result of the self-fulfilling beliefs of market participants. An incomplete-information approach is used to overcome many undesirable features of existing multiple-equilibrium explanations of contagion. If speculators expect contagion across markets to occur, they have an incentive to trade in both currency markets to take advantage of this correlation. These actions, in turn, link the two markets in such a way that a sharp devaluation of one currency will be propagated to the other market, fulfilling the ...
Journal Article
Understanding monetary policy implementation
The Federal Reserve implements its monetary policy objectives by intervening in the interbank market for overnight loans. In particular, it aims to change the supply of reserves available to commercial banks so that the (average) interest rate in this market equals an announced target rate. A recent change in legislation will give the Federal Reserve greater flexibility in this process by allowing it to pay interest on reserve balances. Together, the change and recent events in financial markets have renewed interest in the process of monetary policy implementation. This article presents a ...
Journal Article
Stability of funding models: an analytical framework
With the recent financial crisis, many financial intermediaries experienced strains created by declining asset values and a loss of funding sources. In reviewing these stress events, one notices that some arrangements appear to have been more stable?that is, better able to withstand shocks to their asset values and/or funding sources?than others. Because the precise determinants of this stability are not well understood, gaining a better grasp of them is a critical task for market participants and policymakers as they try to design more resilient arrangements and improve financial regulation. ...
Working Paper
Aggregate Liquidity Management
It has been largely acknowledged that monetary policy can affect borrowers and lenders differently. This paper investigates whether the distributional effects of monetary policy are an inherent feature of monetary economies with private credit instruments. In our framework, both money and credit instruments can potentially be used as media of exchange to overcome trading frictions in decentralized markets. Entrepreneurs have access to productive projects but face credit constraints due to limited pledgeability of their returns. Monetary policy affects the liquidity premium on private credit ...