Fix Money Funds Now

On September 19, 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, the U.S. Treasury announced that it would guarantee the liabilities of money market mutual funds (MMMFs). And, the Federal Reserve created an emergency facility (“Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility”) to finance commercial banks’ purchases of illiquid MMMF assets. These policy actions halted the panic.

That episode drove home what we all knew: MMMFs are vulnerable to runs. Everyone also knew that the Treasury and Fed bailout created enormous moral hazard. Yet, the subsequent regulatory efforts to make MMMFs more resilient and less bank-like have proven to be half-hearted and, in some cases, counterproductive. So, to halt another run in March 2020, the Fed revived its 2008 emergency liquidity facilities.

We hope the second time’s the charm, and that U.S. policymakers will now act decisively to prevent yet another panic that would force yet another MMMF bailout.

In this post, we briefly review key regulatory changes affecting MMMFs over the past decade and their impact during the March 2020 crisis. We then discuss the options for MMMF reform that the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets identifies in their recent report. Our conclusion is that only two or three of the report’s 10 options would materially add to MMMF resilience. The fact that everyone has known about these for years highlights the political challenge of enacting credible reforms.

The Federal Home Loan Banks: Two Lessons in Regulatory Arbitrage

There is an important U.S. government-sponsored banking system that most people know nothing about. Created by an act of Congress in 1932, the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBs) issue bonds that investors perceive as having government backing, and then use the proceeds to make loans to their members: namely, 6,800 commercial banks, credit unions, insurance companies and savings associations. As the name suggests, the mission of the (currently 11) regional, cooperatively owned FHLBs is “to support mortgage lending and related community investment.” But, since the system was founded, its role as an intermediary has changed dramatically.

With assets of roughly $1 trillion, it turns out that the FHLBs—which operate mostly out of the public eye—have been an important source of regulatory arbitrage twice over the past decade. In the first episode—the 2007-09 financial crisis—they partly supplanted the role of the Federal Reserve as the lender of last resort. In the second, the FHLBs became intermediaries between a class of lenders (money market mutual funds) and borrowers (banks), following regulatory changes designed in part to alter the original relationship between these lenders and borrowers. The FHLBs’ new role creates an implicit federal guarantee that increases taxpayers’ risk of loss.

In this post, we highlight these episodes of regulatory arbitrage as unforeseen consequences of a complex financial system and regulatory framework, in combination with the malleability and opaqueness of the FHLB system.…

The Scandal is What's Legal

If you haven’t seen The Big Short, you should. The acting is superb and the story enlightening: a few brilliant outcasts each discover just how big the holes are that eventually bury the U.S. financial system in the crisis of 2007-2009. If you’re like most people we know, you’ll walk away delighted by the movie and disturbed by the reality it captures. [Full disclosure: one of us joined a panel organized by the film’s economic consultant to view and discuss it with the director.]

But we're not film critics, The movie—along with some misleading criticism—prompts us to clarify what we view as the prime causes of the financial crisis. The financial corruption depicted in the movie is deeply troubling (we've written about fraud and conflicts of interest in finance here and here). But what made the U.S. financial system so fragile a decade ago, and what made the crisis so deep, were practices that were completely legal. The scandal is that we still haven't addressed these properly....

Dodd-Frank: Five Years After

On July 21, 2010, President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (hereafter, DF), the most sweeping financial regulatory reform in the United States since the 1930s. DF explicitly aims to limit systemic risk, allow for the safe resolution of the largest intermediaries, submit risky nonbanks to greater scrutiny, and reform derivatives trading.

How to celebrate its fifth birthday? Well, if you are like us, it will be a sober affair, reflecting serious worries about the continued vulnerability of the financial system.

Let’s have a look at the most noteworthy accomplishments and the biggest failings so far. Starting with the successes, here are our top five:

Making Finance Safe

Walter Wriston, Citicorp’s chief for nearly two decades until 1984, used to argue that banks’ didn’t need much, if any, capital. The global financial crisis put that view to rest. Today, we know that if banks are going to be able to absorb large unforeseen losses that would otherwise threaten financial stability, they need to finance themselves with equity, not just debt.

But how much capital do banks need to have to ensure the financial system is safe? Even after the financial crisis, answers to this question range widely, making it the single most contentious source of debate among bankers, regulators, and academics...

Regulating Money Market Mutual Funds: An Update

The SEC has finally acted. On July 23, the SEC issued 859 pages of new rules for the operation of some money market funds. (You can find a mercifully short description here.) To summarize our reaction: we are underwhelmed! It is hard to see how the new rules will reduce systemic risk in any meaningful way...

Reverse Repo Risks

Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the Federal Reserve has stabilized the financial system and put the economy back on a path to sustainable growth. This task involved creating a colossal balance sheet, which now stands at $4.37 trillion, more than four times the pre-Lehman level ($940 billion). As textbooks (like ours) teach, along with this increase in Fed assets has come an increase in reserve liabilities (which represent deposits by banks at the Fed). Today, banks’ excess reserves (that is, the extra reserves beyond those that banks must hold at the Fed) are at $2.56 trillion, compared to virtually zero prior to the crisis.

Getting the money and banking system back to normal requires doing something to manage these excess reserves ...

Are Big Asset Managers Systemic?

The Financial System Oversight Council (FSOC) is considering whether any asset managers should be designated as systemically important financial intermediaries (SIFIs), making them subject to supervision by the Federal Reserve. In the same vein, the Financial Stability Board recently proposed a framework for determining whether an asset manager is a global SIFI.

The question itself is highly controversial...

Form vs. Function: Regulating Money Market Funds

Following the collapse of Lehman in 2008, a run on U.S. prime money market mutual funds (MMMFs) was halted only when the U.S. Treasury provided a blanket guarantee. (Prime MMMFs typically invest in corporate debt, including the debt of intermediaries.) Shortly thereafter, the Federal Reserve added emergency machinery (the “Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility”) to encourage depositories to acquire illiquid assets from MMMFs...

Commentary

Money, Banking, and Financial Markets