Prior to the 2007-2008 financial crisis, excess reserves in the U.S. banking system were scarce. After the financial crisis and up until early 2018, excess reserves were abundant. In this article, the authors document, analyze, and explain the differences in the performance of the federal funds...

Real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems such as CHAPS Sterling require large amounts of liquidity to support payment activity. To meet their liquidity needs, RTGS participants borrow from the central bank or rely on incoming payments from other participants. Both options can prove costly-the...

The Federal Reserve's Fedwire funds transfer service-the biggest large-value payments system in the United States-has long displayed a peak of activity in the late afternoon. Theory suggests that the concentration of late-afternoon Fedwire activity reflects coordination among participating banks...

The author focuses on the relative emphasis that the structure of regulatory capital places on formulas and on supervision. The two are not viewed as mutually exclusive, but as elements to which capital policy implicitly assigns relative weights. He shows that in U.S. regulatory practice, these...

The author provides a few practical comments on capital adequacy from an insurance company perspective. In doing so, he presents two views on capital adequacy and capital allocation in the insurance industry. The first view is the regulatory perspective, that is, the motivations behind...

In this paper, the authors consider how risk measures, based on internal models of this type, might be integrated into a firm's own methodology for allocating risk capital to its individual business units and for determining its optimal capital structure. They also consider the implications of...