In August of 2007, banks faced a freeze in funding liquidity from the asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market. We investigate how banks scrambled for liquidity in response to this freeze and its implications for corporate borrowing. Commercial banks in the United States raised deposits and...

The notion that some banks are “too big to fail” builds on the premise that governments will offer support to avoid the adverse consequences of their disorderly failures. However, this promise of support comes at a cost: Large, complex, or interconnected banks might take on more risk if they...

We study liquidity and systemic risk in high-value payment systems. Flows in high-value systems are characterized by high velocity, meaning that the total amount paid and received is high relative to the stock of reserves. In such systems, banks rely heavily on incoming funds to finance outgoing...

The notion that some banks are “too big to fail” builds on the premise that governments will offer support to avoid the adverse consequences of disorderly bank failures. However, this promise of support comes at a cost: large, complex or interconnected banks might take on more risk if they...

The CLASS model is a top-down capital stress testing framework that projects the effect of different macroeconomic scenarios on U.S. banking firms. The model is based on simple econometric models estimated using public data and also on assumptions about loan loss provisioning, taxes, asset...

The CLASS model is a top-down capital stress testing framework that uses public data, simple econometric models and auxiliary assumptions to project the effect of macroeconomic scenarios on U.S. banking firms. Through the lens of the model, we find that the total banking system capital shortfall...

We study the relationship between bank capital ratios and the distribution of future real GDP growth. Growth in the aggregate bank capital ratio corresponds to a smaller left tail of GDP - smaller crisis probability - but at the cost of a smaller right tail of growth outcomes - smaller...