This paper studies the rapid increase since 2019 of Government of Canada (GoC) debt issuance alongside greater hedge fund participation at GoC bond auctions. We find a systematic relationship between GoC debt stock and hedge fund bidding shares at auction. We attribute this to hedge funds'...

The concept of settlement balances is simple in its definition but complex when attempting to understand how they interplay between a central bank and the financial system. Settlement balances can be defined as interest-bearing deposits that belong to participants of Canada's payment system and...

The recent revival of Hyman P. Minsky’s ideas among policymakers, economists, bankers, financial institutions, and the mass media, synchronized with the increasing gravity of the subprime financial crisis, demands a reappraisal of the meaning and scope of the “financial instability...

Central counterparty (CCP) initial margin models are procyclical by nature, and CCPs use antiprocyclicality (APC) tools to mitigate this. However, despite the widespread use of such tools, margin models of CCPs around the world reacted severely to the heightened volatility during the March 2020...

This paper describes the ecology of automated market makers (AMMs), which are the most popular decentralized exchange model for the pricing and trading of crypto assets within decentralized finance. We use blockchain data to identify trends in user adoption and trading volumes of AMMs. Given the...

In times of stress, if the potential demand from asset managers for market liquidity approaches or exceeds dealers' ability to intermediate, it could lead to a precautionary but disruptive dash for cash and may lead central banks to intervene. If the likelihood of such a dash for cash increases...

This paper proposes a practical approach to address the procyclicality of initial margin at central counterparties (CCPs) that can work even in periods of extreme stress. The approach allows CCPs to limit the speed of margin increases resulting from spikes in market volatility. To maintain the...

Every initiative that potentially increases the effectiveness of monetary policy is welcome. The European Union’s Capital Markets Union (CMU) project is potentially a point in case, even though monetary policy is not a policy target of CMU. Increasingly developed capital markets in the EU are...

In this paper, we present a novel method to extract the risk-neutral probability of default of a firm from American put option prices. Building on the idea of a default corridor proposed in Carr and Wu (2011), we derive a parsimonious closed-form formula for American put option prices from which...