Law Commons^™

The Federal Reserve As Collateral's Last Resort, Colleen M. Baker

Notre Dame Law Review

This Essay is the first step in a broader normative project analyzing the proper balance between legislation and central bank policy—between architecture and implementation—in shaping the Federal Reserve’s collateral framework to best promote market discipline and to minimize credit allocation. Its modest aim is twofold. First, it provides the first analysis of central bank collateral frameworks in the legal scholarship. Second, it analyzes the equilibrium between legislation and central bank policy in the Federal Reserve’s collateral framework in the context of its section 13(3) emergency liquidity authority, lending authority for designated financial market utilities, and swap lines with foreign central …

Fedaccounts: Digital Dollars, Morgan Ricks, J. Crawford, L. Menand

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

We are entering a new monetary era. Central banks around the world- spurred by the development of privately controlled digital currencies as well as competition from other central banks-have been studying, building, and, in some cases, issuing central bank digital currency ("CBDC").

Although digital fiat currency is one of the hottest topics in macroeconomics and central banking today, the discussion has largely over- looked the most straightforward and appealing strategy for implementing a U.S. dollar-based CBDC: expanding access to bank accounts that the Federal Reserve already offers to a small, favored set of clients. These accounts consist of entries in …

Privacy Beyond Possession: Solving The Access Conundrum In Digital Dollars, Nerenda N. Atako

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The advent of a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) could reshape the US payments system. A retail CBDC would be a digital representation of the US dollar in the form of an account or token that is widely accessible to the general public. It would be a third form of US fiat money that is created and issued by the Federal Reserve and complementary to physical cash. CBDC proposals have suggested a myriad of retail CBDC design models with an overwhelming interest in a retail CBDC that either implements a centralized ledger system or some form of a distributed …

The Federal Reserve And The 2020 Economic And Financial Crisis, Lev Menand

Faculty Scholarship

This Article provides a comprehensive legal analysis of the Federal Reserve's response to the 2020 economic and financial crisis. First, it examines the sixteen ad hoc lending facilities that the Fed established to fight the crisis and sorts them into two categories. Six advance the Fed's monetary mission and were designed to halt a run on financial institutions. Ten go beyond the Fed's traditional role and are designed to directly support financial markets and the real economy. Second, it maps these programs onto the statutory framework for money and banking. It shows that Congress's signature crisis legislation, the CARES Act, …