Finance Commons^™

The United Kingdom's Commercial Paper Facility (U.K. Gfc), Claire Simon

Journal of Financial Crises

In January 2009, following continued increases in commercial paper spreads, Her Majesty’s Treasury authorized the Bank of England to begin purchasing commercial paper under the Asset Purchase Facility (APF) in order to maintain UK-based corporations’ access to short-term financing. Under the Commercial Paper Facility (CPF), the Bank purchased commercial paper from both primary issuers and secondary holders at a rate that was favorable to issuers during the credit crunch but that would no longer be attractive once the markets recovered. By serving as a backstop, or market maker of last resort (MMLR), the Bank helped to restore liquidity to corporate …

The United Kingdom's Asset Purchase Program (U.K. Gfc), Ariel Smith

Journal of Financial Crises

On March 5, 2009, in the wake of the fallout from the Global Financial Crisis, the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England announced a new, unconventional policy measure: quantitative easing. The MPC determined that simply cutting the Bank Rate in the face of a recession would not be enough to boost spending and increase inflation to meet the Bank’s goal of a 2% CPI-inflation target in the medium term. Rather, over the course of the next year, the Bank purchased £200 billion of assets—primarily gilts—in reverse auctions through a newly created Asset Purchase Program. After just under one …

Japan's Special Funds-Supplying Operations (Japan Gfc), Alec Buchholtz

Journal of Financial Crises

Following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the global commercial paper (CP) market began to tighten as interest rates rose and investors sought more-liquid money market securities. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) introduced several measures in late 2008 to make liquidity available to nonfinancial corporations that were strapped for cash. In December 2008, the BOJ implemented special funds-supplying operations in order to provide unlimited liquidity to banks and other financial institutions so they could continue to fund nonfinancial corporations. The BOJ would provide one- to three-month loans against an equal value of eligible corporate debt at a rate …

Japan's Outright Purchases Of Commercial Paper (Japan Gfc), Alec Buchholtz

Journal of Financial Crises

Following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the global commercial paper (CP) market began to tighten as interest rates rose and investors sought more-liquid money market securities. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) introduced several operations in late 2008 to promote liquidity in the CP market. In January 2009, the BOJ began to purchase CP and asset-backed CP outright from banks and other financial institutions. The BOJ could purchase up to ¥3 trillion of CP with a residual maturity of up to three months, among other short-term securities, via 10 purchases of up to ¥300 billion each. The BOJ …

The European Central Bank's Covered Bond Purchase Programs I And Ii (Ecb Gfc), Ariel Smith

Journal of Financial Crises

In July 2009, the European Central Bank introduced a nonstandard measure to revitalize the European covered bond market, which at the time financed about one-fifth of mortgages in Europe. The market struggled after the collapse of Lehman Brothers as the global financial crisis intensified in 2008. Over the course of the program, which lasted 12 months, European central banks, collectively known as “the Eurosystem,” conducted direct purchases in both primary and secondary markets to a total of €60 billion of covered bonds. The Eurosystem held the purchased covered bonds until maturity and made them eligible for lending to counterparties as …

The European Central Bank's Three-Year Long-Term Refinancing Operations (Ecb Gfc), Aidan Lawson

Journal of Financial Crises

The announcement of the three-year Long-Term Refinancing Operations (LTROs) by the European Central Bank (ECB) on December 8, 2011, signaled the beginning of the largest ECB market liquidity programs to date. Continued and increasing liquidity-related pressures in the form of ballooning financial market credit default swap (CDS) spreads, Euro-area volatility, and interbank lending rates prompted a much more forceful ECB response than what had been done previously. The LTROs, using a repurchase (repo) agreement auction mechanism, allowed any Eurozone financial institution to tap essentially unlimited funding at a fixed rate of just 1%. Because the three-year LTROs were so similar …

The Public-Private Investment Program: The Legacy Securities Program (U.S. Gfc), Ben Henken

Journal of Financial Crises

On March 23, 2009, the U.S. Treasury, in conjunction with the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), announced the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP). PPIP consisted of two complementary programs designed to foster liquidity in the market for certain mortgage-related assets: The Legacy Loans Program and the Legacy Securities Program. This case study discusses the design and implementation of the Legacy Securities Program. Under this program, the Treasury formed an investment partnership with nine private sector firms it selected at the conclusion of a months-long application process. Using a combination of private equity and debt and equity …

The Public-Private Investment Program: The Legacy Loans Program (U.S. Gfc), Ben Henken

Journal of Financial Crises

On March 23, 2009, the U.S. Treasury, in conjunction with the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), announced the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP). PPIP consisted of two complementary programs designed to foster liquidity in the market for certain mortgage-related assets: The Legacy Loans Program and the Legacy Securities Program. This case study discusses the design and implementation of the Legacy Loans Program. Under this program, the FDIC and Treasury attempted to create public-private investment partnerships that—using a combination of private equity, Treasury equity, and FDIC-guaranteed debt—would purchase legacy mortgage loans from U.S. banks by way of …

The Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (Talf) (U.S. Gfc), June Rhee

Journal of Financial Crises

In the fall of 2008, the securitization market, which was the major provider of credit for consumers and small businesses, came to a near halt. Investors in this market abandoned not only the residential mortgage-backed securities that triggered the financial crisis but also consumer and business asset-backed securities (ABS), which had a long track record of strong performance, and commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS). Also, the unprecedented widening of spreads for these securities rendered new issuance uneconomical, and the shutdown of the securitization market threatened to exacerbate the downturn in the economy.

On November 25, 2008, the Federal Reserve (the Fed) …

The Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (Amlf) (U.S. Gfc), Rosalind Z. Wiggins

Journal of Financial Crises

In mid-September 2008, following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, money market mutual funds (MMMFs) began to experience run-like redemption requests after a large fund “broke the buck,” owing to a large position in Lehman commercial paper (CP). Funds, which as a group were the largest investors in CP, retreated from CP, including asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP). Funds also sought to raise cash to meet redemptions by selling assets but were reluctant to sell ABCP into a depressed market. As the CP and ABCP markets seized up, it became difficult for issuers to place new paper, and concern grew about possible …

The Money Market Investor Funding Facility (U.S. Gfc), Rosalind Z. Wiggins

Journal of Financial Crises

In mid-September 2008, money market mutual funds (MMMFs) began to experience run-like redemption requests after the Reserve Primary Fund “broke the buck.” As a result, MMMFs became reluctant to roll over or invest in commercial paper (CP) and faced the prospect of selling asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) they held into a declining market to raise cash. The money markets quickly became negatively impacted, and on October 21, 2008, the Fed announced the Money Market Investor Funding Facility (MMIFF), which would loan funds to a series of special purpose vehicles (SPVs) established by the private sector. The SPVs would use the …

Term Securities Lending Facility (Tslf) (U.S. Gfc), Manuel Leon Hoyos

Journal of Financial Crises

The 2007–09 financial crisis reached a critical stage in March 2008. Amid falling house prices and downgrades of mortgage-related securities, financial markets became severely disrupted. The Federal Reserve—the US central bank—became increasingly concerned about the inability of the 20 primary dealers, including the five largest US investment banks, to fund themselves in short-term funding markets, such as the repurchase agreement market, then estimated at $10 trillion. In response, the Fed created several emergency lending facilities to restore market liquidity that required the Fed to invoke Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. The Term Securities Lending Facility authorized the Federal …

The Primary Dealer Credit Facility (Pdcf) (U.S. Gfc), Karen Yang

Journal of Financial Crises

On March 16, 2008, the Federal Reserve created the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, or PDCF, to provide overnight funding to primary dealers in the tri-party repurchase agreement (repo) market, where lenders had become increasingly risk averse. Loans were fully secured by (initially) investment-grade securities and offered at the primary credit rate by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The eligible collateral was significantly expanded in September 2008, after rumors of Lehman Brothers potentially filing for bankruptcy, to include all of the types of instruments that could be pledged at the two major tri-party repo clearing banks. The PDCF was …

The Federal Reserve Single-Tranche Term Repurchase Agreements (U.S. Gfc), Aidan Lawson

Journal of Financial Crises

As mortgage defaults and foreclosures continued to climb, the severe strains that started to plague credit markets in the middle of 2007 worsened further. Losses on housing-related securities and derivative instruments continued to climb, causing substantial damage to the balance sheets of large financial institutions that had levered up on these same securities. As their positions worsened, banks found it increasingly difficult to attract funding that wasn’t priced at exorbitantly high rates or for very short terms. Term funding markets, specifically those that centered on agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS), quickly dried up as fears of illiquidity and even insolvency spread. …

The Federal Reserve’S Response To The 1987 Market Crash (U.S. Historical), Kaleb B. Nygaard

Journal of Financial Crises

The S&P 500 lost 10% the week ending Friday, October 16, 1987, and lost an additional 20% the following Monday, October 19, 1987. The date would be remembered as Black Monday. The Federal Reserve (the Fed) responded to the crash in four distinct ways: (1) issuing a public statement promising to provide liquidity, as needed, “to support the economic and financial system”; (2) providing support to the Treasury securities market by injecting in-high-demand maturities into the market via reverse repurchase agreements; (3) allowing the federal funds rate to fall from 7.5% to 7.0% and below; and (4) intervening directly to …

Market Liquidity Programs: Gfc And Before, June Rhee, Greg Feldberg, Ariel Smith, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

The virulence of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–09 (GFC) was explained in large part by the increased reliance of the global financial system on market-based funding and the lack of preexisting tools to address a disruption in that type of system. This paper surveys market liquidity programs (MLPs), which we define as government interventions in which the key motivation is to stabilize liquidity in a specific wholesale funding market that is under stress. Most of the MLPs surveyed in this paper were launched during and after the GFC, but two pre-GFC MLPs are included. A subsequent survey on MLPs …

Designing The Main Street Lending Program: Challenges And Options, William B. English, J. Nellie Liang

Journal of Financial Crises

The Main Street Lending Program (MSLP) was established by the Federal Reserve to provide loans to small and mid-sized firms and large below-investment-grade firms that were financially sound before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The program, which was established under the Fed’s Section 13(3) emergency authorities, is supported by capital from the U.S. Treasury and became operational in July 2020; however, utilization has been slight. We describe the economic challenges in designing a loan support program and evaluate the MSLP program in terms of how it manages significant asymmetric information, adverse selection, poor targeting, and moral hazard problems while …

Frm Financial Risk Meter, Andrija Mihoci, Michael Althof, Cathy Yi-Hsuan Chen, Wolfgang Karl Hardle

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

A systemic risk measure is proposed accounting for links and mutual dependencies between financial institutions utilizing tail event information. Financial Risk Meter (FRM) is based on least absolute shrinkage and selection operator quantile regression designed to capture tail event co-movements. The FRM focus lies on understanding active set data characteristics and the presentation of interdependencies in a network topology. Two FRM indices are presented, namely, FRM@Americas and FRM@Europe. The FRM indices detect systemic risk at selected areas and identify risk factors. In practice, FRM is applied to the return time series of selected financial institutions …

Teres: Tail Event Risk Expectile Shortfall, Andrija Mihoci, Wolfgang Karl Hardle, Cathy Yi-Hsuan Chen

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

We propose a generalized risk measure for expectile-based expected shortfall estimation. The generalization is designed with a mixture of Gaussian and Laplace densities. Our plug-in estimator is derived from an analytic relationship between expectiles and expected shortfall. We investigate the sensitivity and robustness of the expected shortfall to the underlying mixture parameter specification and the risk level. Empirical results from the US, German and UK stock markets and for selected NASDAQ blue chip companies indicate that expected shortfall can be successfully estimated using the proposed method on a monthly, weekly, daily and intra-day basis using a 1-year or 1-day time …

Financial Knowledge And Portfolio Complexity In Singapore, Benedict S. K. Koh, Olivia S. Mitchell, Susann Rohwedder

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Financial literacy in Singapore has not been analyzed in much detail, despite the fact that this is one of the world’s most rapidly aging nations. Using the Singapore Life Panel®, we explore older Singaporeans’ levels of financial knowledge and compare them to those observed in the United States. We assess portfolio complexity for these older households, to examine how financial literacy is related to outcomes of interest. We show that older Singaporeans’ levels of financial literacy are comparable overall to those in the United States, even though older Singaporeans score slightly lower on some dimensions (knowledge of interest and inflation), …