Money market funds (MMFs) are popular around the world, with over $9 trillion in assets under management globally. From their origins in the 1970s, MMFs have operated in a niche between the capital markets and the banking system, as investment funds that offer private money-like assets with...

This paper studies the mid-September 2019 stress in U.S. money markets: On September 16 and 17, unsecured and secured funding rates spiked up and, on September 17, the effective federal funds rate broke the ceiling of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) target range. We highlight two...

A major lesson of the recent financial crisis is that the interbank lending market is crucial for banks that face uncertainty regarding their liquidity needs. This paper examines the efficiency of the interbank lending market in allocating funds and the optimal policy of a central bank in...

We study the incentives of participants in a real-time gross settlement system with and without the addition of a liquidity-saving mechanism (queue). Participants in our model face a liquidity shock and different costs for delaying payments. They trade off the cost of delaying a payment against...

We develop a model in which financial intermediaries hold liquidity to protect themselves from shocks. Depending on parameter values, banks may choose to hold too much or too little liquidity on aggregate compared with the socially optimal amount. The model endogenously generates a situation of...

This paper studies banks' incentives regarding the timing of payment submissions in a collateral-based RTGS payment system and how these incentives change with the introduction of a liquidity-saving mechanism (LSM). We show that an LSM allows banks to economise on collateral while also providing...

This paper attempts to quantify the benefits associated with operating a liquidity-saving mechanism (LSM) in Fedwire, the large-value payment system of the Federal Reserve. Calibrating the model of Martin and McAndrews (2008), we find that potential gains are large compared to the likely cost of...