During the Panic of 1907, New York City trust companies were not members of the New York Clearinghouse whereas trust companies in Chicago were members of the Chicago Clearinghouse. We argue that the apparent isolation of New York City trust companies from the pool of bank reserves controlled by...

An analysis of the contribution of scale economies, technological change, and falling input prices to the absolute reduction in the real processing costs of an ACH transfer over the 1979-94 period.

It is common knowledge that the Federal Reserve System was originally set up to provide the nation with a stable currency and a sound banking system. Less well known, however, is why the Fed was given an operating role in the nation's payments system. In this article, James N. Duprey and...

Since the Great Depression, the Fed has historically intervened during potential financial crises to ensure that financial market participants were provided with the liquidity necessary to complete their transactions. In recent years, this part of the Fed's role in the payments system has come...

This paper attempts to capture the portfolio incentives for central bank participation in a multilateral trade clearinghouse and to discuss the relation of those incentives to the volume of trade. Clearing­houses for the netting of multilateral intra-regional trade have existed since the 1950s,...

This article summarizes a conference, titled “Issues Related to Central Counterparty Clearing,” cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the European Central Bank on April 3–4, 2006. The conference brought together industry executives, policymakers, and research economists to...