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Journal Article
So Far, So Good: Government Insurance of Financial Sector Tail Risk
The US government has intervened to provide extraordinary support 16 times from 1970 to 2020 with the goal of preventing or mitigating (or both) the cost of financial instability to the financial sector and the real economy. This article discusses the motivation for such support, reviewing the instances where support was provided, along with one case where it was expected but not provided. The article then discusses the moral hazard and fiscal risks posed by the government's insurance of the tail risk along with ways to reduce the government's risk exposure.
Report
The side effects of safe asset creation
We present an incomplete markets model to understand the costs and benefits of increasing government debt in a low interest rate environment. Higher risk increases the demand for safe assets, lowering the natural rate of interest below zero, constraining monetary policy at the zero lower bound, and raising unemployment. Higher government debt satiates the demand for safe assets, raising the natural rate and restoring full employment. While this permanently lowers investment, a policymaker committed to low inflation has no alternative. Higher inflation targets, instead, permit both full ...
Discussion Paper
Beyond 30: Long-Term Treasury Bond Issuance from 1953 to 1957
Ever since “regular and predictable” issuance of coupon-bearing Treasury debt became the norm in the 1970s, thirty years has marked the outer boundary of Treasury bond maturities. However, longer-term bonds were not unknown in earlier years. Seven such bonds, including one 40-year bond, were issued between 1955 and 1963. The common thread that binds the seven bonds together was the interest of Treasury debt managers in lengthening the maturity structure of the debt. This post describes the efforts to lengthen debt maturities between 1953 and 1957. A subsequent post will examine the period ...
Journal Article
So Far, So Good: Government Insurance of Financial Sector Tail Risk
The US government has intervened to provide extraordinary support 16 times from 1970 to 2020 with the goal of preventing or mitigating (or both) the cost of financial instability to the financial sector and the real economy. This article discusses the motivation for such support, reviewing the instances where support was provided, along with one case where it was expected but not provided. The article then discusses the moral hazard and fiscal risks posed by the government's insurance of the tail risk along with ways to reduce the government's risk exposure.
Journal Article
Pricing government credit: a new method for determining government credit risk exposure
A growing debate centers on how best to recognize (and price) government interventions in the capital markets. This study applies a method for estimating and valuing the government?s exposure to credit risk through its loan and guarantee programs. The authors use the mortgage portfolios of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as examples of how policymakers could employ this method in pricing the government?s program credit risk. Building on the cost of capital approach, the method captures each program?s possible tail loss over and above its expected value. The authors then use a capital allocation ...
Working Paper
Identifying Global and National Output and Fiscal Policy Shocks Using a GVAR
The paper contributes to the growing Global VAR (GVAR) literature by showing how global and national shocks can be identified within a GVAR framework. The usefulness of the proposed approach is illustrated in an application to the analysis of the interactions between public debt and real output growth in a multi-country setting, and the results are compared to those obtained from standard single-country VAR analysis. We find that on average (across countries) global shocks explain about one-third of the long-horizon forecast error variance of output growth, and about one-fifth of the long-run ...
Working Paper
Financial Intermediation and Aggregate Demand: A Sufficient Statistics Approach
We provide a unified framework to study how the financial sector affects the transmission of macroeconomic policies, such as monetary and fiscal policies, and asset purchase programs. Our framework nests models of financial intermediation with various microfoundations and allows for rich household heterogeneity. The financial sector supplies liquidity by issuing liquid assets to finance illiquid capital. The elasticities of liquidity supply with respect to returns are sufficient statistics that summarize how the financial sector determines responses to policy through asset markets. This asset ...
Working Paper
The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level in a World of Low Interest Rates
A central equation for the fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL) is the government budget constraint (or "government valuation equation"), which equates the real value of government debt to the present value of fiscal surpluses. In the past decade, the governments of most developed economies have paid very low interest rates, and there are many other periods in the past in which this has been the case. In this paper, we revisit the implications of the FTPL in a world where the rate of return on government debt may be below the growth rate of the economy, considering different sources for ...
Conference Paper
Crowding out redefined: the role of reserve accumulation
It is well understood that investment serves as a shock absorber at the time of crisis. The duration of the drag on investment, however, is perplexing. For the nine Asian economies we focus on in this study, average investment/GDP is about 6 percentage points lower during 1998-2012 than its average level in the decade before the crisis; if China and India are excluded, the estimated decline exceeds 9 percent. We document how in the wake of crisis home bias in finance usually increases markedly as public and private sectors look inward when external financing becomes prohibitively costly, ...
Working Paper
Optimal Public Debt with Life Cycle Motives
Public debt can be optimal in standard incomplete market models with infinitely lived agents, since the associated capital crowd-out induces a higher interest rate. The higher interest rate encourages individuals to save and, hence, better self-insure against idiosyncratic labor earnings risk. Even though individual savings behavior is a crucial determinant of the optimality of public debt, this class of economies abstracts from empirically observed life cycle savings patterns. Thus, this paper studies how incorporating a life cycle affects optimal public debt. We find that while the ...