This paper studies the mid-September 2019 stress in U.S. money markets: On September 16 and 17, unsecured and secured funding rates spiked up and, on September 17, the effective federal funds rate broke the ceiling of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) target range. We highlight two...

Monetary policy measures taken by the Federal Reserve as a response to the 2007-09 financial crisis and subsequent economic conditions 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 rates in...

We review recent changes in monetary policy that have led to development and testing of an overnight reverse repurchase agreement (ON RRP) facility, an innovative tool for implementing monetary policy during the normalization process. Making ON RRPs available to a broad set of investors,...

We develop a model in which financial intermediaries hold liquidity to protect themselves from shocks. Depending on parameter values, banks may choose to hold too much or too little liquidity on aggregate compared with the socially optimal amount. The model endogenously generates a situation of...

Large-scale asset purchases by the Federal Reserve as well as new Basel III banking regulations have led to important changes in U.S. money markets. Most notably, the interbank market has essentially disappeared with the dramatic increase in excess reserves held by banks. We build a model in the...

We offer a parsimonious model of the reserve demand to study the tradeoffs associated with various monetary policy implementation frameworks. Prior to the 2007-09 financial crisis, many central banks supplied scarce reserves to execute their interest-rate policies. In response to the crisis,...

How can a central bank control interest rates in an environment with large excess reserves? In this paper, we develop a dynamic general equilibrium model of a secured money market and calibrate it to the Swiss franc repo market to study this question. The theoretical model allows us to identify...

Over millennia, mankind has used hard cash in various forms ranging from shells to gold coins and paper. More recently, cash has become unpopular in political circles, as it effectively restricts states’ power to tax (explicitly or via negative interest rates) or to survey and potentially...