In the decade prior to the financial crisis, foreign banks’ exposure to U.S.-dollar-denominated assets rose dramatically. When the crisis hit in 2007, the banks’ access to dollar funding came under severe duress, with potentially dire consequences for global financial markets that could also...

Overview of Special Issue: Federal Reserve Policy Responses to the Financial Crisis.

Established in the wake of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy to stabilize severe disruptions in the commercial paper market, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF) allowed the Federal Reserve to act as a lender of last resort for issuers of commercial paper, thereby effectively addressing...

The failure and near-collapse of some of the largest dealer banks on Wall Street in 2008 highlighted the marked vulnerability of the industry. Dealer banks are financial intermediaries that make markets for many securities and derivatives. Like standard banks, dealer banks may derive the funding...

This is the introduction to a volume which explores the changing role of banks in the financial intermediation process. It accompanies a Liberty Street Blog series. Both discuss the complexity of the credit intermediation chain associated with securitization and note the growing participation of...

New York Fed economists Asani Sarkar and Jeffrey Shrader examine the Federal Reserve’s recent liquidity actions in the context of studies on financial amplification mechanisms, whereby an initial financial sector shock triggers substantially larger shocks elsewhere in the sector and in the...

Bank for International Settlements researchers Stephen Cecchetti and Piti Disyatat consider the implications of recent financial developments for the “lender-of-last-resort” function of central banks and whether traditional policymaking tools remain effective in the face of modern liquidity...

Yale University professor John Geanakoplos discusses implications of “the leverage cycle”—a phenomenon in which leverage is excessive prior to a financial crisis and unacceptably low during the crisis—for regulatory policy and reform. Presented as the keynote address at "Central Bank...

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a report -- New Directions for Understanding Systemic Risk -- that presents key findings from a cross-disciplinary conference that it cosponsored in May 2006 with the National Academy of Sciences' Board on Mathematical Sciences and Their...

Two theories of the causes of currency crises prevail in the economic literature. The first traces currency instability to countries' structural imbalances and weak policies; the second identifies arbitrary shifts in market expectations as the principal source of instability. The authors of this...