We employ a model of leverage-induced explosive behavior in financial markets to develop a measure of financial market instability. Specifically, we derive a quantitative condition for how large levered investors can become relative to the whole market before the demand curve for securities...

The goal of integrated risk management in a financial institution is to measure and manage risk and capital across a range of diverse business activities. This requires an approach for aggregating risk types (market, credit, and operational) whose distributional shapes vary considerably. In this...

This paper explores financial stability policies for the shadow banking system. I tie policy options to economic mechanisms for shadow banking that have been documented in the literature. I then illustrate the role of shadow bank policies using three examples: agency mortgage real estate...

Many large U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs) continued to pay dividends during the recent financial crisis, even as financial market conditions deteriorated, large losses accumulated, and emergency capital and liquidity were being provided by the official sector. In contrast, share repurchases...

We examine the financial conditions of dealers that participated in two of the Federal Reserve’s lender-of-last-resort (LOLR) facilities--the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) and the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF)--that provided liquidity against a range of assets during 2008-09....

Pierret (2015) presents empirical analysis of the solvency-liquidity nexus for the banking system, documenting that a shock to the level of banks’ solvency risk is followed by lower short-term debt. Conversely, higher short-term debt Granger-causes higher solvency risk. These results point...

In the conduct of monetary policy, there exists a risk-return trade-off between financial conditions and financial stability, which complements monetary policy’s traditional trade-off between inflation and real activity. The trade-off exists even if monetary policy does not target financial...

Remarks at the Workshop on Reforming Culture and Behavior in the Financial Services Industry, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City.

Remarks at the Workshop on Reforming Culture and Behavior in the Financial Services Industry, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City.

We build a general equilibrium model with financial frictions that impede the effectiveness of monetary policy in stimulating output. Agents with heterogeneous productivity can increase investment by levering up, but this increases interim liquidity risk. In equilibrium, the more productive...