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Speech
Welcoming remarks at the Community Bankers Conference, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City
Remarks at the Community Bankers Conference, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City.
Discussion Paper
How Do Interest Rates (and Depositors) Impact Measures of Bank Value?
The rapid rise in interest rates across the yield curve has increased the broader public’s interest in the exposure embedded in bank balance sheets and in depositor behavior more generally. In this post, we consider a simple illustration of the potential impact of higher interest rates on measures of bank franchise value.
Working Paper
Can Spanned Term Structure Factors Drive Stochastic Yield Volatility?
The ability of the usual factors from empirical arbitrage-free representations of the term structure?that is, spanned factors?to account for interest rate volatility dynamics has been much debated. We examine this issue with a comprehensive set of new arbitrage-free term structure specifications that allow for spanned stochastic volatility to be linked to one or more of the yield curve factors. Using U.S. Treasury yields, we find that much realized stochastic volatility cannot be associated with spanned term structure factors. However, a simulation study reveals that the usual realized ...
Working Paper
Financial Characteristics of Cost of Funds Indexed Loans
Two recent articles by Hancock and Passmore (2016) and Passmore and von Hafften (2017) make several suggestions for improving the home mortgage contract to make homeownership more achievable for creditworthy borrowers. Though the proposals in the two papers differ in some aspects, one common feature is an adjustable rate indexed to a cost of funds (COF) measure. Such indices are based on the interest expense as a fraction of liability balance for one or a group of depository institutions. One of these, the 11th District Cost of Funds (COF) Index, was in wide use in the 1980s and '90s, but use ...
Journal Article
Are Banks Exposed to Interest Rate Risk?
While banks seem to face inherent risk from short-term interest rate changes, in practice they structure their balance sheets to avoid exposure to such risk. Nonetheless, recent research finds that banks cannot offload all of the interest rate risk they are naturally exposed to. Historically, banks’ profit margins reflect their compensation for taking on interest rate risk and their stock prices are highly sensitive to changes in interest rates. These findings can help practitioners assess banks’ risk exposures and may have implications for unconventional monetary policy.
Working Paper
Interest Rate Risk at US Credit Unions
Rising interest rates have prompted concerns about losses on bank assets, especially following the failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in March 2023. In this working paper, we examine whether US credit unions could be subject to similar losses as banks and analyze how their regulatory capital would be affected. We estimate that after realizing losses from assets that have decreased in value and not yet been sold the overall net worth of the credit union industry would have fallen by 40 percent in 2023:Q1. Unrealized losses were most severe at the largest credit unions. Nonetheless, the bulk ...
Journal Article
The Failure of the Bank of the Commonwealth: An Early Example of Interest Rate Risk
This Economic Commentary describes the collapse and subsequent bailout of the Detroit-headquartered Bank of the Commonwealth in 1972. Commonwealth failed because it invested heavily in long-duration, fixed-rate municipal securities in the mid-1960s in a bet that interest rates would decline. Instead, with the beginning of the Great Inflation of 1965–1980, rates rose. Liquidity problems then ensued, and the bank approached failure. Unable to find an acquirer because of Michigan’s banking restrictions, regulators instead bailed out the bank because of fears of contagion. This article also ...