David R. Skeie

A Model of Liquidity Hoarding and Term Premia in Inter-Bank Markets

Financial crises are associated with reduced volumes and extreme levels of rates for term inter-bank loans, reflected in the one-month and three-month Libor. We explain such stress by modeling leveraged banks’ precautionary demand for liquidity. Asset shocks impair a bank’s ability to roll over debt because of agency problems associated with high leverage. In turn, banks hoard liquidity and decrease term lending as their rollover risk increases over the term of the loan. High levels of short-term leverage and illiquidity of assets lead to low volumes and high rates for term borrowing. In extremis, inter-bank markets can completely freeze.

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 with the empirical results. Our theoretical results show that banks rationally hold excess reserves intraday and overnight as a precautionary measure against liquidity shocks. Moreover, the intraday fed funds rate can spike above the discount rate and crash to near zero. Apparent anomalies during the financial crisis may be seen as stark but natural outcomes of our model of the interbank market. The model also provides a unified explanation for several stylized facts and makes new predictions for the interbank market.

LIBOR: Origins, Economics, Crisis, Scandal, and Reform

The London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) is a widely used indicator of funding conditions in the interbank market. As of 2013, LIBOR underpins more than

The Fragility of Short-Term Secured Funding Markets

300 trillion of financial contracts, including swaps and futures, in addition to trillions more in variable-rate mortgage and student loans. LIBORs volatile behavior during the financial crisis provoked questions surrounding its credibility. Ongoing regulatory investigations have uncovered misconduct by a number of financial institutions. Policymakers across the globe now face the task of reforming LIBOR in the aftermath of the scandal and crisis.

Identifying Term Interbank Loans from Fedwire Payments Data

This paper develops an infinite-horizon 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 determinants depend on the borrowerʼs (endogenous) balance sheet and on (exogenous) fundamentals. Systemic runs are possible if shocks to the valuation of collateral held by outside investors are sufficiently strong and uniform, and if the system as a whole is exposed to high short-term funding risk. The theory has policy implications for prudential regulation and lender-of-last-resort interventions.

A Note on Bank Lending in Times of Large Bank Reserves

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 shortening of loan maturities, and a decline in term lending volume following the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Several diagnostic tests suggest that our approach provides a useful source of information about the term interbank market, allowing for a number of research applications.

Federal Reserve Tools for Managing Rates and Reserves

The amount of reserves held by the U.S. banking system reached

A Sampling-Window Approach to Transactions-Based Libor Fixing

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 decisions. We find that large reserve balances do not lead to excessive bank credit and may instead be contractionary.

Money and Modern Banking without Bank Runs

Monetary policy measures taken by the Federal Reserve as a response to the 200709 …nancial crisis and subsequent economic downturn led to a large increase in the level of outstanding reserves. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has a range of tools to control short-term market interest rates in this situation. We study several of these tools, namely interest on excess reserves (IOER), reverse repurchase agreements (RRPs), and the term deposit facility (TDF). We …nd that overnight RRPs (ON RRPs) provide a better ‡oor on rates than term RRPs because they are available to absorb daily liquidity shocks. Whether the TDF or RRPs best support equilibrium rates depends on the relative intensity of the frictions that banks face, which are bank balance sheet costs and interbank monitoring costs in our model. We show that when both costs are large, � �

Bank Liquidity, Interbank Markets, and Monetary Policy

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 of transactions. Limitations of this sampling-window approach are also discussed.