Ever since the emergence of regular and predictable issuance of coupon-bearing Treasury debt 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 with a forty-year term,...

In the second half of 1953 the United States, for the first time, risked exceeding the statutory limit on Treasury debt. This paper describes how Congress, the White House, and Treasury officials dealt with the looming crisis—by deferring and reducing expenditures, monetizing “free” gold...

Following the Treasury–Federal Reserve Accord of March 3, 1951, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) focused on free reserves—the difference between excess reserves (reserve deposits in excess of reserve requirements) and borrowed reserves—as the touchstone of U.S. monetary policy....

This paper presents a history of the primary dealer system from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. The paper focuses on two formal programs: the “recognized” dealer program adopted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 1939 and the “qualified” dealer program adopted by the Federal...

Modern money and capital markets are not free-form bazaars where participants are left alone to contract as they choose, but rather are circumscribed by a variety of statutes, regulations, and behavioral norms. This paper examines the circumstances surrounding the introduction of a set of norms...

The U.S. Treasury announced in August 2005 that it is exploring whether to provide a backstop securities lending facility for U.S. Treasury securities. This paper examines the conceptual basis for such a facility by comparing the market for borrowing and lending Treasury securities to the market...

This paper examines market liquidity in the post-crisis era in light of concerns that regulatory changes might have reduced dealers' ability and willingness to make markets. We begin with a discussion of the broader trading environment, including an overview of regulations and their potential...

We study how the Indian government bond market functions, how it has changed over time, and what factors help explain some of its features. Looking at the primary market, we describe how underwriting obligations are allocated to primary dealers via auction and identify several significant...

The U.S. Treasury market is highly intermediated by nonbank principal trading firms (PTFs). Limited capital forces PTFs to end the trading day roughly flat. We construct a continuous time market making model to analyze the trade-off faced by a profit-maximizing firm with overnight inventory...

Order book and transactions data from the U.S. Treasury securities market are used to calculate daily measures of bid-ask spreads, depth, and price impact for a twenty-six-year sample period (1991-2017). From these measures, a daily index of Treasury market liquidity is constructed, reflecting...