A financial crisis is an event in which the holders of short-term debt come to question the collateral backing that debt. So, the resiliency of the financial system depends on the quality of that collateral. We show that there is a shortage of high-quality collateral by examining the convenience...

The financial architecture prior to the recent financial crisis was a system of mobile collateral. Safe debt, whether government bonds or privately-produced bonds, i.e., asset-backed securities, could be traded, posted as collateral, and rehypothecated, moving to its highest value use. Since the...

Modern financial crises are difficult to explain because they do not always involve bank runs, or the bank runs occur late. For this reason, the first year of the Great Depression, 1930, has remained a puzzle. Industrial production dropped by 20.8 percent despite no nationwide bank run. Using...

The Financial Crisis began and accelerated in short-term money markets. One such market is the multi-trillion dollar sale-and-repurchase (repo) market, where prices show strong reactions during the crisis. The academic literature and policy community remain unsettled about the role of repo runs,...

The Financial Crisis began and accelerated in short-term money markets. One such market is the multi-trillion dollar sale-and-repurchase (“repo”) market, where prices show strong reactions during the crisis. The academic literature and policy community remain unsettled about the role of repo...

A financial crisis is an event in which the holders of short-term debt come to question the collateral backing that debt. So, the resiliency of the financial system depends on the quality of that collateral. We show that there is a shortage of high-quality collateral by examining the convenience...