NY Fed Blog on Gates, Fees, Runs
The Federal Reserve of New York’s Liberty Street Economics blog published a piece on "Gates, Fees, and Preemptive Runs." Authors Marco Cipriani, Antoine Martin, Patrick McCabe, and Bruno M. Parigi write: "In the academic literature on banks, "suspension of convertibility" -- that is, preventing the exchange of deposits at par for cash -- has traditionally been seen as a potential means of preventing economically damaging bank runs. In this post, however, we show that giving a financial intermediary (FI) the option to suspend convertibility may ultimately increase the risk of runs by causing preemptive runs. That is, investors who face potential restrictions on their future access to cash may run when they anticipate that such restrictions may be imposed. This insight is relevant for policymaking in today's financial system. For example, in July 2014, the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted rules that are intended to reduce the likelihood of runs on money market funds (MMFs) by giving the funds' boards the option to halt (or "gate") redemptions or to charge fees for redemptions when liquidity runs short, actions analogous to suspending the convertibility of deposits into cash at par. Our results show that the option to suspend convertibility has important drawbacks: A bank, MMF, or other FI with the option to suspend convertibility may become more fragile and vulnerable to runs. In other words, we show that instead of offering a solution, policies relying on gates and fees can be part of the problem." The authors, who speak for themselves and not the NYFED, conclude, "Giving an FI the option to impose gates or fees may be destabilizing because the option itself can trigger damaging runs that otherwise would not have occurred. This result is likely to hold for a variety of adjustments to the assumptions in our model, because the intuition is stark: The possibility of a fee or any other measure that is costly enough to counter investors' strong incentives to run amid a crisis will give investors a strong incentive to run preemptively to avoid such measures. Even though our model does not address how runs on FIs can create large negative externalities for the financial system and the real economy, one important policy implication is clear: Giving FIs, such as MMFs, the option to restrict redemptions when liquidity falls short may threaten financial stability by setting up the possibility of preemptive runs." Another recent post on the Liberty Street Economics blog is on "Financial Stability Monitoring." Authors Tobias Adrian, Daniel Covitz, and Nellie Liang write: "We define systemic risk as the potential for widespread financial externalities -- whether from corrections in asset valuations, asset fire sales, or other forms of contagion -- to amplify financial shocks and in extreme cases disrupt financial intermediation. Potential financial externalities may have cyclical causes. For example, in an economic expansion, leverage might proliferate throughout the financial sector, which in turn could increase the potential for asset fire sales. Potential financial externalities may also have structural roots, as with money market mutual funds, which in their current form are susceptible to runs by their own investors and consequently tend to always create the potential for asset fire sales and other forms of contagion. This paper offers a strategy for monitoring cyclical financial vulnerabilities, and also discusses policy options for addressing them."
