Search Results
Discussion Paper
Unlocking the Treasury Market through TRACE
The U.S. Treasury market is widely regarded as the deepest and most liquid securities market in the world, playing a critical role in the global economy and in the Federal Reserve’s implementation of monetary policy. Despite the Treasury market’s importance, the official sector has historically had limited access to information on cash market transactions. This data gap was most acutely demonstrated in the investigation of the October 15, 2014, flash event in the Treasury market, as highlighted in the Joint Staff Report (JSR). Following the JSR, steps were taken to improve regulators’ ...
Report
Consistent covariance matrix estimation in probit models with autocorrelated errors
Some recent time-series applications use probit models to measure the forecasting power of a set of variables. Correct inferences about the significance of the variables requires a consistent estimator of the covariance matrix of the estimated model coefficients. A potential source of inconsistency in maximum likelihood standard errors is serial correlation in the underlying disturbances, which may arise, for example, from overlapping forecasts. We discuss several practical methods for constructing probit autocorrelation-consistent standard errors, drawing on the generalized method of moments ...
Discussion Paper
Breaking Down TRACE Volumes Further
Following an earlier joint FEDS Note and Liberty Street Economics blog post that examined aggregate trading volume in the Treasury cash market across venues, this post looks at volume across security type, seasoned-ness (time since issuance), and maturity. The analysis, which again relies on transactions recorded in the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority's (FINRA) Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine (TRACE), sheds light on perceptions that some Treasury securities—in particular those that are off-the-run—may not trade very actively. We confirm that most trading volume is made up of ...
Journal Article
Government securities investments of commercial banks
Government securities holdings at U.S. commercial banks have risen rapidly since 1990. The author contrasts the recent rise with increases observed during and after earlier recessions and evaluates possible explanations for the buildup. In addition, he presents a rough estimate of the interest exposure created solely by the securities acquisitions and compares it with estimates for earlier periods when commercial banks also added U.S. securities to their portfolios at a fast rate.
Discussion Paper
Reconciling Survey- and Market-Based Expectations for the Policy Rate
In our previous post, we showed that the gap between the market-implied path for the federal funds rate and the survey-implied mean expectations for the federal funds rate from the Survey of Primary Dealers (SPD) and the Survey of Market Participants (SMP) narrowed from the December survey to the January survey. In particular, we provided explanations for this narrowing as well as for the subsequent widening from January to March. This post continues the discussion by presenting a novel approach called ?tilting? that yields insights by measuring how much the survey probability distributions ...
Monograph
Nonbank lenders and the credit slowdown
Conference Paper
Why do volatilities sometimes move together?