Margin requirements

Free Riding in Finance: A Primer

Many features of our financial system—institutions like banks and insurance companies, as well as the configuration of securities markets—are a consequence of legal conventions (the rules about property rights and taxes) and the costs associated with obtaining and verifying information. When we teach money and banking, three concepts are key to understanding the structure of finance: adverse selection, moral hazard, and free riding. The first two arise from asymmetric information, either before (adverse selection) or after (moral hazard) making a financial arrangement (see our earlier primers here and here).

This primer is about the third concept: free riding. Free riding is tied to the concept of a public good, so we start there. Then, we offer three examples where free riding plays a key role in the organization of finance: credit ratings; schemes like the Madoff scandal; and efforts to secure financial stability more broadly....

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Monetary Policy and Financial Stability

In June 2015, a committee of Federal Reserve Bank Presidents conducted a “macroprudential tabletop exercise”—a kind of wargame—to determine what tools to use should risks to financial stability arise in an environment when growth and inflation are stable. The conventional wisdom—widely supported in policy pronouncements and in a range of academic studies—is that the appropriate tools are prudential (capital and liquidity requirements, stress tests, margin requirements, supervisory guidance and the like). Yet, in the exercise, the policymakers found these tools more unwieldy and less effective than anticipated. As a result, “monetary policy came more quickly to the fore as a financial stability tool than might have been thought.”

This naturally leads us to ask whether there are circumstances when central bankers should employ monetary policy tools to address financial stability concerns. Making the case for or against use of monetary policy to secure financial stability is usually based on assessing the costs and benefits of a policy that "leans against the wind" (LAW) of financial imbalances...

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Can Margin Requirements Improve Financial Resilience?

Eight years after the financial crisis began, the regulatory reforms it spawned continue apace. Over the past year, regulators introduced total loss absorbing capacity (TLAC) and the liquidity coverage ratio (LCR) to make banks more resilient. And, with an eye toward strengthening market function, authorities continue to push for central clearing of derivatives (CCPs).

Overlapping with these goals—and extending to nonbanks—is the recent move to establish standards for margin requirements in securities transactions: that is, the maximum amount that someone can borrow when using a given security as collateral...

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Central Clearing Parties: What they are and why we need them - Part 3

The CCP Advantage: Incentive and Means to Control Counterparty Risks

The case of the insurance giant, AIG, highlights the information and incentives problems that CCPs can address. In the run-up to the financial crisis, AIG’s London-based Financial Products Group managed to sell enormous amounts of credit risk insurance without the liquid resources necessary to cover potential cash calls. By end-June 2008, AIG had taken on $446 billion in notional credit risk exposure as a seller of credit risk protection via credit default swaps (CDS).

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