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To understand which short-term debt markets experienced \"runs\" during the financial crisis, we analyze a novel data set of repurchase agreements (repo), that is, loans between nonbank cash lenders and dealer banks collateralized with securities. Consistent with a run, repo volume backed by private asset-backed securities falls to near zero in the crisis. However, the reduction is only $182 billion, which is small relative to the stock of private asset-backed securities as well as the contraction in asset-backed commercial paper. While the repo contraction is small in aggregate, it disproportionately affected a few dealer banks.

The repo market has been viewed as a potential source of financial instability since the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis, based in part on findings that margins increased sharply in a segment of this market. This paper provides evidence suggesting that there was no system-wide run on repo. Using confidential data on tri-party repo, a major segment of this market, we show that, the level of margins and the amount of funding were surprisingly stable for most borrowers during the crisis. However, we also document a sharp decline in the tri-party repo funding of Lehman in September 2008.

Realizing that their traditional instruments were inadequate for responding to the crisis that began on August 9, 2007, Federal Reserve officials improvised. Beginning in mid-December 2007, they implemented a series of changes directed at ensuring that liquidity would be distributed to those institutions that needed it most. Conceptually, this meant America's central bankers shifted from focusing solely on the size of their balance sheet, which they use to keep the overnight interbank lending rate close to their chosen target, to manipulating the composition of their assets as well. In this paper, I examine the Federal Reserve's conventional and unconventional responses to the financial crisis of 2007–2008.

During the recent financial crisis, major dealer banks—that is, banks that intermediate markets for securities and derivatives—suffered from new forms of bank runs. The most vivid examples are the 2008 failures of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Dealer banks are often parts of large complex financial organizations whose failures can damage the economy significantly. As a result, they are sometimes considered “too big to fail.” The mechanics by which dealer banks can fail and the policies available to treat the systemic risk of their failures differ markedly from the case of conventional commercial bank runs. These failure mechanics are the focus of this article. This is not a review of the financial crisis of 2007–2009. Systemic risk is considered only in passing. Both the financial crisis and the systemic importance of large dealer banks are nevertheless obvious and important motivations.

Chapter 11 bars bankrupt debtors from immediately repaying their creditors, so that the bankrupt firm can reorganize without creditors' cash demands shredding the bankrupt's business. Not so for the bankrupt's derivatives counterparties, who, unlike most other secured creditors, can seize and immediately liquidate collateral, readily net out gains and losses in their dealings with the bankrupt, terminate their contracts with the bankrupt, and keep both preferential eveof-bankruptcy payments and fraudulent conveyances they obtained from the debtor, all in ways that favor them over the bankrupt's other creditors. Their right to jump to the head of the bankruptcy repayment line, in ways that even ordinary secured creditors cannot, weakens their incentives for market discipline in managing their dealings with the debtor because the rules reduce their concern for the risk of counterparty failure and bankruptcy. If derivatives counterparties and financial repurchase creditors, who are treated similarly well in bankruptcy, were made to account better for counterparty risk, they would be more likely to insist that there be stronger counterparties on the other side of their derivatives bets, thereby insisting for their own good on strengthening the financial system. True, because derivatives counterparties bear less risk, nonprioritized creditors bear more and those nonprioritized creditors thus have more market-discipline incentives to assure themselves that the debtor is a safe bet. But the derivatives markets' other creditors—such as the United States—are poorly positioned either to consistently monitor the derivatives debtors well or to fully replicate the needed market discipline. Bankruptcy policy should harness private incentives for counterparty market discipline by cutting back the extensive advantages Chapter 11 and related laws now bestow on these investment channels. More generally, when we subsidize derivatives and similar financial activity via bankruptcy benefits unavailable to other creditors, we get more of the activity than we otherwise would. Repeal would induce these burgeoning financial markets to better recognize the risks of counterparty financial failure, which in turn should dampen the possibility of another AIG-, Bear Stearns-, or Lehman Brothers-style financial meltdown, thereby helping to maintain systemic financial stability. Repeal would end the de facto bankruptcy subsidy of these financing channels. Yet the major financial reform package Congress enacted in response to the financial crisis lacks the needed changes.

We test the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) effectiveness by regressing changes in repo rates and spreads on changes in the amount outstanding under the TSLF. The underlying premise for the analysis is that an increase (decrease) in the amount of collateral available to the private market should decrease (increase) its marginal value, because of downward sloping demand, resulting in a higher (lower) repo rate. We look at changes on the settlement days of TSLF operations, because overnight repo rates are affected by the supply of securities in the market on that day. We assess changes in repo rates relative to changes in the Fed funds target rate, which tend to be immediately transmitted to overnight rates. We include dummy variables in our models for the last and first trading days of the quarter. Our regression results indicate that Schedule 2 operations affect repo rates and spreads. Changes in Schedule 2 operations are positively related to the overnight Treasury repo rate, suggesting the that TSLF mitigates shortages of liquid Treasury collateral. Changes in the amount outstanding from Schedule 2 operations are negative related to agency and agency MBS repo spreads, suggesting that the TSLF narrows repo spreads. Agency and agency MBS repo rates are positively related to the amount outstanding from Schedule 2 operations. The positive relationships suggest that agency debt and agency MBS are close substitutes for liquid Treasury collateral and are not for the less liquid collateral that can be pledged in Schedule 2 operations.

We investigate the extent to which banks’ quarter-end borrowings in the repurchase market deviate from within-quarter levels, and associated factors. Quarter-end repo liabilities are materially lower than within-quarter averages for a large fraction of sample banks. These deviations are more pronounced at banks with a higher concentration of repo borrowings in their liability structure and with larger absolute trading gains or losses. Furthermore, the association with trading activity is mitigated when banks are better capitalized. We also find that these deviations are associated with bank depositor and borrower behavior. Together, the evidence suggests that deviations reflect both active window dressing and passive customer-driven liquidity dynamics. We document that unexpected downward quarter-end deviations in repo liabilities are associated with adverse short-term capital market consequences. Over the long term, banks with more frequent downward quarter-end deviations exhibit higher credit risk, but we find mixed evidence for equity market valuation multiples.

Using data on repurchase agreements by primary securities dealers, we show that three classes of securities (Treasury securities, securities issued by government-sponsored agencies, and mortgage-backed securities) can be formally ranked in terms of their collateral values in the general collateral (GC) market. We then show that GC repurchase agreement (repo) spreads across asset classes display jumps and significant temporal variation, especially at times of predictable liquidity needs, consistent with the \"safe haven\" properties of Treasury securities: These jumps are driven almost entirely by the behavior of the GC repo rates of Treasury securities. Estimating the \"collateral rents\" earned by owners of these securities, we find such rents to be sizable for Treasury securities and nearly zero for agency and mortgage-backed securities. Finally, we link collateral values to asset prices in a simple no-arbitrage framework and show that variations in collateral values explain a significant fraction of changes in short-term yield spreads but not those of longer-term spreads.Our results point to securities' role as collateral as a promising direction of research to improve understanding of the pricing of money market securities and their spreads.

This article provides the causes and symptoms of special repo rates in a competitive market for repurchase agreements. A repo rate is, in effect, an interest rate on loans collateralized by a specific instrument. A \"special\" is a repo rate significantly below prevailing market riskless interest rates. This article shows that specials can occur when those owning the collateral are inhibited, whether from legal or institutional requirements or from frictional costs, from supplying collateral into repurchase agreements. Specialness increases the equilibrium price for the underlying instrument by the present value of savings in borrowing costs associated with the repo specials.

What is the nature of imperfections in the market for liquidity? Studying bidder level data from European Central Bank (ECB) repo auctions, we find that this market appears to be informationally efficient in the sense that participants do not have private information about future short-term rates. However, auction allocations affect banks' subsequent behavior in a way that is consistent with a degree of allocational and operational inefficiency. Also, large bidders appear to have better access to the interbank market than small ones. Finally, the evidence suggests that the ECB uses collateral haircuts that do not equilibrate opportunity costs.