From its inception, the Federal Reserve has operated payment systems that let banks move money for their customers. Checks, wire transfers, and electronic consumer payments all happen thanks to the Federal Reserve. Congress by statute specified which banks get access to the Fed’s payment...

2003 marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of SUERF. To mark this milestone, some time ago the Council of Management commissioned Professor Jean-Paul Abraham to write a commemorative report. His mandate was not to write a history of SUERF itself (that would be too self-indulgent) but to...

The Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, is one of the most important and powerful institutions in the world. Surprisingly, legal scholarship hardly pays any attention to the Federal Reserve or to the law structuring and governing its legal authority. This is especially...

Regulatory stress tests have become a key tool for setting bank capital levels. Publicly disclosed results for four rounds of stress tests suggest that as the stress testing process has evolved, its outcomes have become more predictable and therefore arguably less informative. In particular,...

This review of the literature on the 2007–09 crisis discusses the precrisis conditions, the crisis triggers, the crisis events, the real effects, and the policy responses to the crisis. The precrisis conditions contributed to the housing price bubble and the subsequent price decline that led...

This paper examines how a market maker adjusts its holdings of credit default swaps (CDS) in response to changes in CDS spreads over different time intervals and finds mixed evidence. Specifically, the negative correlation between weekly changes in CDS spreads and changes in net CDS positions...

The federal banking agencies—the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation—supervise. They work cooperatively with banks and their remedial powers are so extensive they rarely use them. Oversight is designed to proceed through...

This paper examines the interactions of macroprudential and monetary policies. We find, using a range of macroeconomic models used at the European Central Bank, that in the long run, a 1% bank capital requirement increase has a small impact on GDP. In the short run, GDP declines by 0.15-0.35%....

The response of major central banks to the global financial crisis has revived the debate around the interactions between monetary policy (MP) and bank stability. This technical paper sheds light, quantitatively, on the different mechanisms underlying the relationship between MP and bank...