This study examines the resolution of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in order to clarify the sources of complexity in its resolution and to inform the debate on appropriate resolution mechanisms for financial institutions. The authors focus on the settlement of...

The U.S. financial sector grew steadily as a share of the total business sector from 1959 until the recent financial crisis, when the trend reversed. In this article, the authors develop measures based on firm-level data to estimate the size of the financial sector and its subsectors relative to...

New York Fed economists Asani Sarkar and Jeffrey Shrader examine the Federal Reserve’s recent liquidity actions in the context of studies on financial amplification mechanisms, whereby an initial financial sector shock triggers substantially larger shocks elsewhere in the sector and in the...

The small decline in the value of mortgage-related assets relative to the large total losses associated with the financial crisis suggests the presence of financial amplification mechanisms, which allow relatively small shocks to propagate through the financial system. We review the literature...

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the asset-backed securities (ABS) market, resulting in higher spreads on ABS and briefly halting the issuance of some ABS. On March 23, 2020, the Federal Reserve established the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) to support the flow of credit to...