PrefBlog

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has released a staff report by Morten L. Bech and Elizabeth Klee titled The Mechanics of a Graceful Exit: Interest on Reserves and Segmentation in the Federal Funds Market:

To combat the financial crisis that intensified in the fall of 2008, the Federal Reserve injected a substantial amount of liquidity into the banking system. The resulting increase in reserve balances exerted downward price pressure in the federal funds market, and the effective federal funds rate began to deviate from the target rate set by the Federal Open Market Committee. In response, the Federal Reserve revised its operational framework for implementing monetary policy and began to pay interest on reserve balances in an attempt to provide a floor for the federal funds rate. Nevertheless, following the policy change, the effective federal funds rate remained below not only the target but also the rate paid on reserve balances. We develop a model to explain this phenomenon and use data from the federal funds market to evaluate it empirically. In turn, we show how successful the Federal Reserve may be in raising the federal funds rate even in an environment with substantial reserve balances.

This issue has been discussed on PrefBlog before, two posts being Effective Fed Funds Rate Continues to Confuse and Effective Fed Funds Rate: A Technical Explanation?.

The authors state the problem succinctly:

Between the October and December 2008 FOMC meetings the average effective federal funds rate was 32 basis points, while the target was 1 percent; the interest rate paid on reserves was 65 basis points or higher for the entire period. This deviation from the theoretical prediction was surprising for even the most astute observers of the federal funds market (Hamilton, 2008, for example). Why did interest on reserves provide an imperfect floor for the federal funds rate, even after the policy was changed so that the interest rate paid on reserves was set equal to the target rate?2 Why would any financial institution lend out funds below the rate paid by the central bank? And even if that were the case, arbitrageurs would surely relish the opportunity of making a pure profit by borrowing cheaply in the market and placing the proceeds with the central bank, and by doing so, move the market rate toward the floor.

… and propose:

The explanation for the puzzling outcome is at least threefold. First, not all participants in the federal funds market are eligible to receive interest on their reserve balances. Government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) in particular, which are significant sellers of funds on a daily basis, are not legally eligible to receive interest on balances held with Reserve Banks. This heterogeneity across participants created a segmented market with different rate dynamics. Second, banks’ apparent general unwillingness or inability to engage in arbitrage has produced a market structure in which those banks that are willing and able to buy funds from the GSEs have been able to exercise bargaining power and pay the GSEs rates below the interest rate paid on reserves. The lack of arbitrage possibly has been driven in part by banks seeking to control the size of their balance sheet more closely in part to avoid stressing regulatory capital and leverage ratios, as mentioned in Bernanke (2009a). Third, a combination of financial consolidation, credit losses, and changes to risk management practices has led at least some GSEs to limit their number of counterparties in the money market and to tighten credit lines. This trimming of potential trading partners has likely decreased bargaining power with the remaining counterparties. In addition, the GSEs have become a larger share of the federal funds market in recent history and hence have pulled down the weighted average federal funds rate.

The paper is organized as:

First, we briefly discuss the institutional details of the federal funds market. Second, we turn to the history and implementation of the interest-on-reserves regime. Third, we present our model of a bifurcated federal funds market with banks and GSEs. We also sketch out how the model can be extended to describe a trifurcated market in which some banks are slow to adopt the new policy regime. Fourth, we calibrate our model to federal funds market data and back out the relative bargaining power of the different market participants. Fifth, we explore the factors that affect our computed bargaining parameters. We show that the level and distribution of reserve balances, rates in other overnight funding markets, and the riskiness of the buyers all have significant predictive power in explaining the bargaining power of the different types of sellers. With this information, in our sixth section, we forecast the effective federal funds rate under a variety of exit scenarios from the current accommodative stance of monetary policy. The seventh section concludes and offers directions for further research.

The Bank for International Settlements has released a working paper by Allen B Frankel titled The risk of relying on reputational capital: a case study of the 2007 failure of New Century Financial:

The quality of newly originated subprime mortgages had been visibly deteriorating for some time before the window for such loans was shut in 2007. Nevertheless, a bankruptcy court’s directed ex post examination of New Century Financial, one of the largest originators of subprime mortgages, discovered no change, over time, in how that firm went about its business. This paper employs the court examiner’s findings in a critical review of the procedures used by various agents involved in the origination and securitisation of subprime mortgages. A contribution of this paper is its elaboration of the choices and incentives faced by the various types of institutions involved in those linked processes of origination and securitisation. It highlights the limited roles played by the originators of subprime loans in screening borrowers and in bearing losses on defective loans that had been sold to securitisers of pooled loan packages (ie, mortgage-backed securities). It also illustrates the willingness of the management of those institutions that became key players in that market to put their reputations with fixed-income investor clients in jeopardy. What is perplexing is that such risk exposures were accepted by investing firms that had the wherewithal and knowledge to appreciate the overall paucity of due diligence in the loan origination processes. This observation, in turn, points to the conclusion that the subprime episode is a case in which reputational capital, a presumptively effective motivator of market discipline, was not an effective incentive device.

The end of the road for New Century came when:

Purchasers of New Century’s loan production normally conducted a due diligence examination after a sales agreement had been reached. The investor, or a due diligence firm hired by the investor, would review loan files to determine whether the loan was underwritten according to the pool’s guidelines. Loans not meeting guidelines could be excluded from the loan bundle (kicked out) and returned to the originator.

Once kicked out, the mortgages were known as a “scratch and dent” (S&D) loans, which were purchased by specialised investors at a large discount to their principal balance. Consequently, one measure of the deterioration of the quality of New Century’s loan production is the percentage of S&D loan sales. In 2004 and 2005, such sales amounted to less than 0.5% of New Century’s secondary market transactions. By contrast, in the first three quarters of 2006, S&D loan sales accounted for 2.1% of such transactions (Missal (2008, p. 68)).

The upsurge in loan repurchase requests to New Century coincided with a change in the methodology employed to estimate its allowance for loan repurchase losses. New Century’s board learned of the change after a considerable delay. This discovery was followed, after a few days, by a public announcement on 7 February 2007 that New Century’s results for the three quarters of 2006 needed to be restated. It also noted an expectation that losses would continue due to heightened early payment default (EPD) rates.

New Century’s announcement prompted margin calls by many of its warehouse lenders and requests for accelerated loan repurchases. Soon, all of New Century’s warehouse lenders ceased providing new funding. Because simultaneous margin calls by its warehouse lenders could not be met, New Century filed for bankruptcy on April 2, 2007. It ceased to originate mortgages and entered into an agreement to sell off its loan servicing businesses.

Amusingly, in the light of the current bonus hysteria:

The examiner’s access to internal New Century documents provided valuable insights into how the appearance of the warning flags influenced, or did not influence, management. For example, the examiner could find no reference to loan quality in the internal documents that described New Century’s bonus compensation system for regional managers for 2005 and 2006 (Missal (2008, p. 147)). The examiner says that the compensation of New Century’s loan production executives was directly and solely related to the amount of mortgage loans originated, loans that, in turn, were subsequently sold or securitised.32 Likewise, the examiner found no mention of penalties (reduced commission payments to loan production staff) that would be assessed against defective loans that required price discounts for secondary market sale.

Heightened investor concerns about the performance of subprime loans were reflected in changes in their due diligence processes (Missal (2008, p. 165)). Historically, investors would ask due diligence firms to examine, on their behalf, only a small sample of loans in a particular pool. The character of the process first changed in 2006 when most investors began to look at the appraisal documents in all loan files in a loan pool. Investors then increased the share of loan files examined. This intensification of due diligence efforts was responsible for a sharp increase in New Century’s kickout rate from 6.9% in January 2006 to 14.95% in December 2006 (Missal (2008, p. 161)).

The author concludes:

The examiner’s report suggests that some of the actions undertaken to improve loan quality in late 2006 and early 2007 were designed to anticipate new credit risk concerns among New Century’s counterparties. Nonetheless, when New Century announced a need to recast its financial reports, there had not yet been a defection by any of its largest counterparties. Not surprisingly, defections ensued immediately after the announcement. In those circumstances, the bunching of defections probably signalled an absence of attention on the part of counterparties to the mounting risks of ongoing transactions with New Century. In turn, the evidence of ineffective counterparty risk management has led to concerns about the effectiveness of existing governance structures (corporate and regulatory) and, in particular, reputational capital as an incentive device. Can those structures now be relied on to discipline the risk-taking incentives of those involved in underwriting securities backed by subprime (and other risky) assets?