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Discussion Paper
Why Did U.S. Branches of Foreign Banks Borrow at the Discount Window during the Crisis?
To help contain the economic damage caused by the recent financial crisis, the Federal Reserve extended large amounts of liquidity to financial firms through traditional lending facilities such as the discount window as well as through newly designed facilities. Recently released Federal Reserve data on discount window borrowing show that some U.S. branches and agencies of foreign banks were among the most active users of the window. In this post, we explain why U.S. branches borrow at the discount window. We also discuss two main reasons why these branches had a large need for dollars during ...
Discussion Paper
Crisis Chronicles: The Hamburg Crisis of 1799 and How Extreme Winter Weather Still Disrupts the Economy
With intermittent war raging across much of Western Europe near the end of the eighteenth century, by about 1795, Hamburg had replaced Amsterdam as an important hub for commodities trade. And from 1795 to 1799, Hamburg boomed. Prices for goods increased, the harbor was full, and warehouses were bulging. But when a harsh winter iced over the harbor, excess demand and speculation drove up prices. By spring, demand proved lower than supply, and prices started falling, credit tightened, and the decline in prices accelerated. So when a ship bound for Hamburg laden with gold sunk off the coast, an ...
Discussion Paper
Crisis Chronicles: The British Export Bubble of 1810 and Pegged versus Floating Exchange Rates
In the early 1800s, Napoleon’s plan to defeat Britain was to destroy its ability to trade. The plan, however, was initially foiled. After Britain helped the Portuguese government flee Napoleon in 1807, the Portuguese returned the favor by opening Brazil to British exports—a move that caused trade to boom. In addition, Britain was able to circumvent Napoleon’s continental blockade by means of a North Sea route through the Baltics, which provided continental Europe with a conduit for commodities from the Americas. But when Britain’s trade via the North Sea was interrupted in 1810, the ...
Discussion Paper
Crisis Chronicles: The Panic of 1819—America’s First Great Economic Crisis
As we noted in our last post on the British crisis of 1816, while Britain emerged from nearly a quarter century of war with France ready to supply the world with manufactured goods, it needed cotton to supply the mills, and all of Europe needed wheat to supplement a series of poor harvests. The United States met that demand for cotton and wheat by expanding agricultural production, facilitated by the loose credit policies of a growing number of lightly regulated state banks. Meanwhile, the Treasury needed revenue to pay off debts from the Louisiana Purchase and the War of 1812, so the ...
Discussion Paper
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.
Report
A sampling-window approach to transactions-based Libor fixing
We examine the properties of a method for fixing Libor rates that is based on transactions data and multi-day sampling windows. The use of a sampling window may mitigate problems caused by thin transaction volumes in unsecured wholesale term funding markets. Using two partial data sets of loan transactions, we estimate how the use of different sampling windows could affect the statistical properties of Libor fixings at various maturities. Our methodology, which is based on a multiplicative estimate of sampling noise that avoids the need for interest rate data, uses only the timing and sizes ...
Report
The fragility of short-term secured funding markets
This paper develops a model of financial institutions that borrow short term and invest in long-term assets that can be traded in frictionless markets. Because these financial intermediaries perform maturity transformation, they are subject to potential runs. We derive distinct liquidity, collateral, and asset liquidation constraints, which determine whether a run can occur as a result of changing market expectations. We show that the extent to which borrowers can ward off an individual run depends on whether it has sufficient liquidity, collateral, and asset liquidation capacity. These ...
Report
Federal Reserve tools for managing rates and reserves
The Federal Reserve announced in January 2019 that it would maintain an ample supply of reserves amid its balance sheet reduction. We model the impact of reserves on banks’ liquidity and balance sheet costs. In competitive general equilibrium, the optimal supply of reserves equates bank deposit rates to the interest rate paid on excess reserves (IOER), consistent with ample reserves. Raising the Fed’s overnight reverse repo rate up to IOER would increase liquidity, expediently reduce the overabundance of reserves, and stabilize the volatility of overnight market rates. Empirical analysis ...
Report
A note on bank lending in times of large bank reserves
The amount of reserves held by the U.S. banking system reached $1.5 trillion in April 2011. Some economists argue that such a large quantity of bank reserves could lead to overly expansive bank lending as the economy recovers, regardless of the Federal Reserve?s interest rate policy. In contrast, we show that the size of bank reserves has no effect on bank lending in a frictionless model of the current banking system, in which interest is paid on reserves and there are no binding reserve requirements. We also examine the potential for balance-sheet cost frictions to distort banks? lending ...
Report
Vesting and control in venture capital contracts
Vesting of equity payments to an entrepreneur, which is a form of time-contingent compensation, is very common in venture capital contracts. Empirical research suggests that vesting is used to help overcome asymmetric information and agency problems. We show in a theoretical model that vesting equity to an entrepreneur over a long period of time acts as a screening device against a bad entrepreneur type. But incomplete contracts due to hold-up by the venture capitalist imply that equity compensation, in the form of either short-term or long-term vesting, cannot provide standard contractible ...