Search Results
Journal Article
The Federal Reserve’s Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility
The securitization markets for consumer and business asset-backed securities (ABS) and commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS), which supply a substantial share of credit to consumers and small businesses, came to a near-complete halt in the fall of 2008, as investors responded to a drastic decline in funding liquidity by curtailing their participation in these markets. In response, the Federal Reserve introduced the TALF program, which extended term loans collateralized by securities to buyers of certain high-quality ABS and CMBS, as part of a broad array of emergency liquidity measures ...
Report
Defaults and losses on commercial real estate bonds during the Great Depression era
We employ a unique data set of public commercial real estate (CRE) bonds issued during the Great Depression era (1920-32) to determine their frequency of default and total loss given default. Default rates on these bonds far exceeded those originated in subsequent periods, driven in part by the greater economic stress of the Depression as well as the lower level of financial sophistication of investors and structures that prevailed in 1920-32. Our results confirm that making loans with higher loan-to-value ratios results in higher rates of default and loss. They also support the business ...
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Understanding the securitization of subprime mortgage credit
In this paper, we provide an overview of the subprime mortgage securitization process and the seven key informational frictions that arise. We discuss the ways that market participants work to minimize these frictions and speculate on how this process broke down. We continue with a complete picture of the subprime borrower and the subprime loan, discussing both predatory borrowing and predatory lending. We present the key structural features of a typical subprime securitization, document how rating agencies assign credit ratings to mortgage-backed securities, and outline how these agencies ...
Report
Shadow bank monitoring
We provide a framework for monitoring the shadow banking system. The shadow banking system consists of a web of specialized financial institutions that conduct credit, maturity, and liquidity transformation without direct, explicit access to public backstops. The lack of such access to sources of government liquidity and credit backstops makes shadow banks inherently fragile. Shadow banking activities are often intertwined with core regulated institutions such as bank holding companies, security brokers and dealers, and insurance companies. These interconnections of shadow banks with other ...
Report
Precautionary reserves and the interbank market
Liquidity hoarding by banks and extreme volatility of the fed funds rate have been widely seen as severely disrupting the interbank market and the broader financial system during the 2007-08 financial crisis. Using data on intraday account balances held by banks at the Federal Reserve and Fedwire interbank transactions to estimate all overnight fed funds trades, we present empirical evidence on banks' precautionary hoarding of reserves, their reluctance to lend, and extreme fed funds rate volatility. We develop a model with credit and liquidity frictions in the interbank market consistent ...
Conference Paper
Has the development of the structured credit market affected the cost of corporate debt?
The rapid development of structured credit markets permits investors to assume credit risk that in aggregate is frequently many times larger than the amount of debt actually issued by an underlying borrower. Given the apparent increased appetite for corporate credit risk by investors, and the additional information revealed in the structured credit markets, a natural question to ask is whether the development of these markets has been associated with a reduction in the cost of debt financing, giving firms an opportunity to operate with greater leverage. Using Markit data identifying when ...
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Shadow banking: a review of the literature
We provide an overview of the rapidly evolving literature on shadow credit intermediation. The shadow banking system consists of a web of specialized financial institutions that conduct credit, maturity, and liquidity transformation without direct, explicit access to public backstops. The lack of such access to sources of government liquidity and credit backstops makes shadow banks inherently fragile. Much of shadow banking activities is intertwined with the operations of core regulated institutions such as bank holding companies and insurance companies, thus creating a source of systemic ...
Report
Shadow banking
The rapid growth of the market-based financial system since the mid-1980s changed the nature of financial intermediation in the United States profoundly. Within the market-based financial system, "shadow banks" are particularly important institutions. Shadow banks are financial intermediaries that conduct maturity, credit, and liquidity transformation without access to central bank liquidity or public sector credit guarantees. Examples of shadow banks include finance companies, asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) conduits, limited-purpose finance companies, structured investment vehicles, ...
Working Paper
The Federal Home Loan Bank System: the lender of next-to-last resort?
The Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) System is a large, complex, and understudied government-sponsored liquidity facility that currently has more than $1 trillion in secured loans outstanding, mostly to commercial banks and thrifts. This paper first documents the significant role played by the FHLB System at the outset of the ongoing financial crisis and then provides evidence about the uses of these funds by their bank and thrift members. We then identify the trade-offs faced by FHLB member-borrowers when choosing between accessing the FHLB System or the Federal Reserve's discount window during ...
Report
New evidence on the lending channel
Do banks play a special role in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy? I use the presence of internal capital markets in bank holding companies to isolate plausibly exogenous variation in the financial constraints faced by subsidiary banks. In particular, I demonstrate that affiliated bank loan growth is less sensitive to changes in the federal funds rate than that of unaffiliated banks, and that these relatively unconstrained banks are better able to smooth insured deposit outflows by issuing uninsured debt. State loan growth also becomes less sensitive to changes in the federal ...