This paper examines the use of U.S. cash dollars as a secondary currency in informal transactions worldwide. While there is considerable interest in and a large theoretical literature on the use of secondary currencies, few empirical results have been established. The primary reason is that the...

Following a scarcity of dollar funding available internationally to banks and financial institutions, in December 2007 the Federal Reserve began to establish or expand Temporary Reciprocal Currency Arrangements with fourteen foreign central banks. These central banks had the capacity to use...

We describe a set of six design principles for the reorganization of the U.S. housing finance system and apply them to one model for replacing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that has so far received frequent mention but little sustained analysis – the lender cooperative utility. We discuss the...

We explore the capital structure and governance of a mortgage-insuring securitization utility operating with government reinsurance for systemic or “tail” risk. The structure we propose for the replacement of the GSEs focuses on aligning incentives for appropriate pricing and transfer of...

I develop a framework of the buildup and outbreak of financial crises in an asymmetric information setting. In equilibrium, two distinct economic states arise endogenously: “normal times,” periods of modest investment, and “booms,” periods of expansionary investment. Normal times occur...

Several programs have been introduced by U.S. fiscal and monetary authorities in response to the financial crisis. We examine the responses involving Treasury debt - the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF), the Supplemental Financing Program, increases in Treasury issuance, and open market...

This paper examines the Federal Reserve's unprecedented liquidity provision during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. It first reviews how the Fed provides liquidity in normal times. It then explains how the Fed's new and expanded liquidity facilities were intended to enable the central bank to...

While the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) broadens the regulatory reach to reduce systemic risks to the U.S. financial system, it does not address some important risks that could migrate to or emanate from entities outside the federal safety net. At the same time, it limits the types of interventions by...

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...

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...