These days it's become convention (reinforced by the media's treatment of wealth) to assess our net worth by tallying up the market value of our financial assets, even though it's more natural and useful to think of our wealth as a stream of dollars over time given the nature of our income and...

We give explicit algorithms and source code for extracting factors underlying Treasury yields using (unsupervised) machine learning (ML) techniques, such as nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) and (statistically deterministic) clustering. NMF is a popular ML algorithm (used in computer...

US money market funds (MMFs) play an important role in short-term markets as large investors of Treasury bills (T-bills) and repurchase agreements (repos) with banks and the Federal Reserve, some of the world’s safest and most liquid assets. We build a theoretical model in which MMFs’...

Households participating in financial markets pay attention to inflation news when making their investment decisions, even in an environment of mostly low and stable inflation. ETFs and open-ended mutual funds holding Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) receive inflows from retail...

This monograph traces the early development of the U.S. Treasury strips market. The stripping of U.S. Treasury securities began in 1982 as a private market. In 1985, the U.S. Treasury began to allow dealers to strip Treasury securities and in 1987 the Treasury permitted reconstitution of strips...

We document the rise and fall of an arbitrage trade among hedge funds known as the Treasury cash-futures basis trade. This trade exploited a fundamental disconnect between cash and futures prices of Treasuries. We show that in recent years a replicating portfolio of Treasury bills and futures...

In the special collateral repo market, forward agreements are security-specific, which may magnify demand and supply effects. We quantify the scarcity value of Treasury collateral by estimating the impact of security-specific demand and supply factors on the repo rates of all outstanding U.S....

The Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) is on a finishing path to replace US dollar LIBOR. A key issue remains, however, namely the lack of credit sensitive, termed rates equivalent to LIBOR rates. Back to SOFR’s root in the Treasury repo market, we compute SOFR term rates by pricing...

Financial intermediaries play a key role in the formation of asset prices. More specifically, the increasing importance of non-bank financial intermediaries has raised new questions about the risks that hedge funds pose to the financial system. We focus on the role that changes in hedge fund...

Specialness - the premium of procuring a specific security in the repo market - increased in the second half of 2011 for Italian government bonds. We assess the impact on specialness of the outright purchase program of the Eurosystem during the same period. Bonds bought by the Eurosystem had...