The U.S. dollar clearing and settlement system received little attention during the recent financial crisis, mainly because it performed reliably, processing record volumes and values of trades made in stressed financial markets. This article shows how Federal Reserve policy measures aimed at...

A recent innovation in large-value payments systems has been the design and implementation of liquidity-saving mechanisms (LSMs), tools used in conjunction with real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems. LSMs give system participants, such as banks, an option not offered by RTGS alone: they can...

We study two designs for a liquidity-saving mechanism (LSM), a queuing arrangement used with an interbank settlement system. With a balance-reactive LSM, banks can set a balance threshold below which payments are not released from the queue, an action not possible with a receipt-reactive LSM....

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...

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

This paper considers the welfare effect of introducing a liquidity-saving mechanism (LSM) in a real-time gross settlement (RTGS) payment system. We study the planner's problem to get a better understanding of the economic role of an LSM and find that an LSM can achieve the planner's allocation...

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...

This paper studies the risk of "fire sales" in the tri-party repo market, a large and important market where securities dealers find short-term funding for a substantial portion of their own and their clients' assets. We distinguish between fire sales of assets by a dealer who, facing a run that...

"In this article, we consider the case for an intraday market for reserves. We discuss the separate roles of intraday and overnight reserves and argue that an intraday market could be organized in the same way as the overnight market. We present arguments in favor of and against a market for...

The amount of reserves held by the U.S. banking system reached $1.5 trillion in April 2011. Some economists argue that such a large quantity of bank reserves could lead to overly expansive bank lending as the economy recovers, regardless of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy. In...