Category Archives: financial markets

Alexander Field (and Santayana) on Financial Regulation

As some in policy circles advocate unilateral financial disarmament, I think it is useful to think about what history tells us about the financial crisis of 2008, which seems to have already receded in people’s collective consciousness. Here I turn to Alexander Field’s new volume on the Great Depression, A Great Leap Forward. From Chapter 10, “Financial Fragility and Recovery”:

The regulatory or policy failure was not simply or primarily a matter of interest rate policy. Rather it was a failure to control, or really be interested in controlling, the growth of leverage. …

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Commodity index funds and agricultural prices

I’ve just completed a new research paper with University of Chicago Professor Cynthia Wu on the Effects of Index-Fund Investing on Commodity Futures Prices. Here was our motivation for writing the paper:

The last decade has seen a phenomenal increased participation by financial investors in commodity futures markets. A typical strategy is to take a long position in a near futures contract, and as the contract nears maturity, sell the position and assume a new long position in the next contract, with the goal being to create an artificial asset that tracks price changes in the underlying commodity. Barclays Capital estimated that exchange traded financial products following such strategies grew from negligible amounts in 2003 to a quarter trillion dollars by 2008 (Irwin and Sanders (2011)). Stoll and Whaley (2010) found that in recent years up to half of the open interest in outstanding agricultural commodity futures contracts was held by institutions characterized by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as commodity index traders.

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JP Morgan and systemic risk

For some time, financial observers have been discussing the large positions in bond-index derivatives amassed by a trader known as the London Whale, now revealed to be Bruno Iksil working for JP Morgan Chase.
On Thursday we learned that JP Morgan has lost over $2 billion in the space of two weeks as a result of the trades. On Friday the stock price fell by 9.3%, wiping out $14.4 billion of the company’s value.

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Should the Fed do more?

Johns Hopkins University Professor Larry Ball, Princeton Professor Paul Krugman, U.C. Berkeley Professor Brad DeLong, University of Oregon Professor Tim Duy and Texas State University Professor David Beckworth are among those recently arguing that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is neglecting his own earlier academic insights into what the central bank should be doing in a situation such as the United States presently finds itself. Here’s what I think they’re overlooking.

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Measuring the consequences of the zero lower bound constraint

In a period of deleveraging such as the U.S. has been going through, it is possible for the natural rate of interest to become negative. Since cash is always an option for earning at least a yield of zero, no asset should ever pay less than zero. This lower bound of zero on nominal interest rates can put a constraint on the ability of the economy to self-correct or the Fed to provide stimulus in such a situation.

The Fed still has some tools to try to reduce longer-term yields, namely large-scale asset purchases and
signaling the Fed’s future intentions. A new research paper by Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President John Williams and Senior Research Advisor Eric Swanson proposes a creative new approach to measuring when and to what extent the zero lower bound is a relevant constraint on interest rates of any maturity.

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