Does demand for safety create instability ? Secured (repo) funding can be made so safe that it never runs, but shifts risk to unsecured creditors. We show that this triggers more frequent runs by unsecured creditors, even in the absence of fundamental risk. This effect is separate from the...

We propose to pool alternative systemic risk rankings for financial institutions using the method of principal components. The resulting overall ranking is less affected by estimation uncertainty and model risk. We apply our methodology to disentangle the common signal and the idiosyncratic...