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1. INTRODUCTION During the financial crisis of 2007-09, particularly around the time of the Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers failures, it became apparent that weaknesses existed in the design of the U.S. tri-party repo market, used by major broker-dealers to finance their inventories of securities. These design weaknesses had the potential to rapidly elevate and propagate systemic risk. Following the crisis, an indus…
An order-book market whose liquidity provision is anchored to a fundamental value carries a restoring force: the price mean-reverts to value and the book refills after a shock. We show this restoring force is a robust intrinsic stabiliser and identify it causally-dialling the anchor down removes the mean-reversion, and a leverage-driven fire-sale then self-sustains. Separately, we ask whether a stressed market transm…
Before the 2008 financial crisis, most research in financial mathematics focused on pricing options without considering the effects of counterparties' defaults, illiquidity problems, and the role of the sale and repurchase agreement (Repo) market. Recently, models were proposed to address this by computing a total valuation adjustment (XVA) of derivatives; however without considering a potential crisis in the market.…
ABSTRACT 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 amou…
We provide a model that links an asset's market liquidity (i.e., the ease with which it is traded) and traders' funding liquidity (i.e., the ease with which they can obtain funding). Traders provide market liquidity, and their ability to do so depends on their availability of funding. Conversely, traders' funding, i.e., their capital and margin requirements, depends on the assets' market liquidity. We show that, unde…
We study market microstructure noise in high-frequency data and analyze its implications for the realized variance (RV) under a general specification for the noise. We show that kernel-based estimators can unearth important characteristics of market microstructure noise and that a simple kernel-based estimator dominates the RV for the estimation of integrated variance (IV). An empirical analysis of the Dow Jones Indu…
ABSTRACT We examine the role of price discovery in the U.S. Treasury market through the empirical relationship between orderflow, liquidity, and the yield curve. We find that orderflow imbalances (excess buying or selling pressure) account for up to 26% of the day‐to‐day variation in yields on days without major macroeconomic announcements. The effect of orderflow on yields is permanent and strongest when liquidity i…
Systemic liquidity risk, defined by the IMF as "the risk of simultaneous liquidity difficulties at multiple financial institutions", is a key topic in macroprudential policy and financial stress analysis. Specialized models to simulate funding liquidity risk and contagion are available but they require not only banks' bilateral exposures data but also balance sheet data with sufficient granularity, which are hardly a…
Abstract In this paper, we identify jumps in U.S. Treasury-bond (T-bond) prices and investigate what causes such unexpected large price changes. In particular, we examine the relative importance of macroeconomic news announcements versus variation in market liquidity in explaining the observed jumps in the U.S. Treasury market. We show that while jumps occur mostly at prescheduled macroeconomic announcement times, an…
This paper examines a comprehensive set of liquidity measures for the U.S. Treasury market. The measures are analyzed relative to one another, across securities, and over time. I find highly significant price impact coefficients, such that a simple model that explains price changes with net order flow produces an R² statistic above 30 percent for the two-year note. The price impact coefficients are highly correlated …
Abstract Following the “flash crash” on May 6, 2010, warning signals for impending market stress have been in high demand, yet only the VPIN metric of Easley, López de Prado, and O’Hara (ELO) has claimed success. In addition, ELO find the metric useful in predicting short-term volatility. VPIN involves decomposing volume into active buys and sells. We utilize quotes and trade data to construct an accurate trade class…
In theory, the sum of squares of log returns sampled at high frequency estimates their variance. When market microstructure noise is present but unaccounted for, however, we show that the optimal sampling frequency is finite and derives its closed-form expression. But even with optimal sampling, using say 5-min returns when transactions are recorded every second, a vast amount of data is discarded, in contradiction t…
Foreword. 1. Markets and Market--Making. 2. Inventory Models. 3. Information--Based Models. 4. Strategic Trader Models I: Informed Traders. 5. Strategic Trader Models II: Uninformed Traders. 6. Information and the Price Process. 7. Market Viability and Stability. 8. Liquidity and the Relationships between Markets. 9. Issues in Market Performance.
In its capacity as debt issuer, the state has played a growing role in financial life over the last 30 years. To examine this role and connect it to shadow banking, the paper develops the concept of the ‘repo trinity’, which captures a set of policy objectives that central banks outlined after the 1998 Russian crisis, the first systemic crisis of collateral-based finance. The repo trinity connected financial stabilit…
Abstract We identify fixed-income mutual funds as an important contributor to the unusually high selling pressure in liquid asset markets during the COVID-19 crisis. We show that mutual funds experienced pronounced investor outflows amplified by their liquidity transformation. In meeting redemptions, funds followed a pecking order by first selling their liquid assets, including Treasuries and high-quality corporate b…
Abstract This paper examines the price differences between very liquid on-the-run U.S. Treasury securities and less liquid off-the-run securities over the on/off cycle. Comparing pairs of securities in time-series regressions allows us to disregard any fixed cross-sectional differences between securities. Also, since the liquidity of Treasury notes varies predictably over time, we can distinguish between current and …
The search for a market design that ensures stable bank funding is at the top of regulators' policy agenda. This paper empirically shows that the central counterparty (CCP)-based euro interbank repo market features this stability. Using a unique and comprehensive data set, we show that the market is resilient during crisis episodes and may even act as a shock absorber, in the sense that repo lending increases with ri…
As the financial crisis deepened and unsecured interbank markets effectively shut down, repo market activity became increasingly concentrated in the very shortest maturities and against the highest-quality collateral. Repo rates for US Treasury collateral fell relative to overnight index swap rates, while comparable sovereign repo rates in the euro area and the United Kingdom rose. The different dynamics across marke…