Collateral is one of the building blocks on which the financial markets are constructed. Used for a number of purposes--including trading with central counterparties (CCPs), secured funding with market counterparties and central banks, OTC derivatives margining and settlement--the role of effective collateral management in monetizing assets has never been more important.

The first book-length study of the importance of collateral frameworks in monetary policy, focusing on the Eurozone and euro crisis.

This paper focuses on how changes in financial plumbing of the markets may impact the monetary policy options as central banks contemplate lift off from zero lower bound (ZLB). Under the proposed regulations, banks will face leverage ratio constraints. As a result of quantitative easing (QE), banks want balance sheet “space” for financial intermediation/ non-depository activities. At the same time, regulatory changes are boosting demand for high quality liquid assets. The paper also discusses the role of repo markets and the importance of collateral velocity and the need to avoid wedges between repo and monetary policy rates when leaving ZLB.

Between 1980 and before the recent crisis, the ratio of financial market debt to liquid assets rose exponentially in the U.S. (and in other financial markets), reflecting in part the greater use of securitized assets to collateralize borrowing. The subsequent crisis has reduced the pool of assets considered acceptable as collateral, resulting in a liquidity shortage. When trying to address this, policy makers will need to consider concepts of liquidity besides the traditional metric of excess bank reserves and do more than merely substitute central bank money for collateral that currently remains highly liquid.

Financial lubrication in markets is indifferent to margin posting via money or collateral; the relative price(s) of money and collateral matter. Some central banks are now a major player in the collateral markets. Analogous to a coiled spring, the larger the quantitative easing (QE) efforts, the longer the central banks will impact the collateral market and associated repo rate. This may have monetary policy and financial stability implications since the repo rates map the financial landscape that straddles the bank/nonbank nexus.

We present evidence of a risk-taking channel of monetary policy for the U.S. banking system. We use confidential data on the internal ratings of U.S. banks on loans to businesses over the period 1997 to 2011 from the Federal Reserve’s survey of terms of business lending. We find that ex-ante risk taking by banks (as measured by the risk rating of the bank’s loan portfolio) is negatively associated with increases in short-term policy interest rates. This relationship is less pronounced for banks with relatively low capital or during periods when banks’ capital erodes, such as episodes of financial and economic distress. These results contribute to the ongoing debate on the role of monetary policy in financial stability and suggest that monetary policy has a bearing on the riskiness of banks and financial stability more generally.

In global financial centers, short-term market rates are effectively determined in the pledged collateral market, where banks and other financial institutions exchange collateral (such as bonds and equities) for money. Furthermore, the use of long-dated securities as collateral for short tenors—or example, in securities-lending and repo markets, and prime brokerage funding—impacts the risk premia (or moneyness) along the yield curve. In this paper, we deploy a methodology to show that transactions using long dated collateral also affect short-term market rates. Our results suggest that the unwind of central bank balance sheets will likely strengthen the monetary policy transmission, as dealer balance-sheet space is now relatively less constrained, with a rebound in collateral reuse.