Search Results
Report
Identifying term interbank loans from Fedwire payments data
Interbank markets for term maturities experienced great stress during the 2007-09 financial crisis, as illustrated by the behavior of the one- and three-month Libor. Despite widespread interest in these markets, little data is available on dollar interbank lending for maturities beyond overnight. We develop a methodology to infer information about individual term dollar interbank loans settled through the Fedwire Funds Service, the large-value bank payment system operated by the Federal Reserve Banks. We find a sharp increase in the dispersion of inferred term interbank interest rates, a ...
Working Paper
Bad Sovereign or Bad Balance Sheets? Euro Interbank Market Fragmentation and Monetary Policy, 2011-2015
We measure the relative role of sovereign-dependence risk and balance sheet (credit) risk in euro area interbank market fragmentation from 2011 to 2015. We combine bank-to-bank loan data with detailed supervisory information on banks? cross-border and cross-sector exposures. We study the impact of the credit risk on banks? balance sheets on their access to, and the price paid for, interbank liquidity, controlling for sovereign-dependence risk and lenders? liquidity shocks. We find that (i) high non-performing loan ratios on the GIIPS portfolio hinder banks? access to the interbank market ...
Discussion Paper
Reallocating Liquidity to Resolve a Crisis
Shortly after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in March 2023, a consortium of eleven large U.S. financial institutions deposited $30 billion into First Republic Bank to bolster its liquidity and assuage panic among uninsured depositors. In the end, however, First Republic Bank did not survive, raising the question of whether a reallocation of liquidity among financial institutions can ever reduce the need for central bank balance sheet expansion in the fight against bank runs. We explore this question in this post, based on a recent working paper.
Working Paper
Filling in the Blanks: Network Structure and Interbank Contagion
The network pattern of financial linkages is important in many areas of banking and finance. Yet bilateral linkages are often unobserved, and maximum entropy serves as the leading method for estimating counterparty exposures. This paper proposes an efficient alternative that combines information-theoretic arguments with economic incentives to produce more realistic interbank networks that preserve important characteristics of the original interbank market. The method loads the most probable links with the largest exposures consistent with the total lending and borrowing of each bank, yielding ...
Working Paper
Can the U.S. Interbank Market Be Revived?
Large-scale asset purchases by the Federal Reserve as well as new Basel III banking regulations have led to important changes in U.S. money markets. Most notably, the interbank market has essentially disappeared with the dramatic increase in excess reserves held by banks. We build a model in the tradition of Poole (1968) to study whether interbank market activity can be revived if the supply of excess reserves is decreased sufficiently. We show that it may not be possible to revive the market to precrisis volumes due to costs associated with recent banking regulations. Although the volume of ...
Working Paper
Relationship lending in the interbank market and the price of liquidity
We empirically investigate the effect that relationship lending has on the availability and pricing of interbank liquidity. Our analysis is based on a daily panel of unsecured overnight loans between 1,079 distinct German bank pairs from March 2006 to November 2007, a period that includes the 2007 liquidity crisis that marked the beginning of the 2007/08 global financial crisis. We find that (i) relationship lenders are more likely to provide liquidity to their closest borrowers, (ii) particularly opaque borrowers obtain liquidity at lower rates when borrowing from their relationship lenders, ...
Working Paper
Wholesale Banking and Bank Runs in Macroeconomic Modeling of Financial Crises
There has been considerable progress in developing macroeconomic models of banking crises. However, most of this literature focuses on the retail sector where banks obtain deposits from households. In fact, the recent financial crisis that triggered the Great Recession featured a disruption of wholesale funding markets, where banks lend to one another. Accordingly, to understand the financial crisis as well as to draw policy implications, it is essential to capture the role of wholesale banking. The objective of this paper is to characterize a model that can be seen as a natural extension of ...
Report
An empirical study of trade dynamics in the interbank market
We use minute-by-minute daily transaction-level payments data to document the cross-sectional and time-series behavior of the estimated prices and quantities negotiated by commercial banks in the fed funds market. We study the frequency and volume of trade, the size distribution of loans, the distribution of bilateral fed funds rates, and the intraday dynamics of the reserve balances held by commercial banks. We find evidence of the importance of the liquidity provision achieved by commercial banks that act as de facto intermediaries of fed funds.
Working Paper
Interbank Markets and Banking Crises: New Evidence on the Establishment and Impact of the Federal Reserve
This paper examines the impact of the Federal Reserve?s founding on seasonal pressures and contagion risk in the interbank system. Deposit flows among classes of banks were highly seasonal before 1914; amplitude and timing varied regionally. Panics interrupted normal flows as banks throughout the country sought funds from the central money markets simultaneously. Seasonal pressures and contagion risk in the system were lower by the 1920s, when the Fed provided seasonal liquidity and reserves. Panics returned in the 1930s, due in part to shocks from nonmember banks and because the Fed?s ...
Report
Cross-country differences in monetary policy execution and money market rates' volatility
The volatility patterns of overnight interest rates differ across industrial countries in ways that existing models, designed to replicate the features of the U.S. federal funds market, cannot explain. This paper presents an equilibrium model of the overnight interbank market that matches these different patterns by incorporating differences in policy execution by the world's main central banks, including differences in central banks' management of marginal lending and deposit facilities in response to shocks. Our model is consistent with central banks' observed practice of rationing access ...