The July 2013 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices addressed changes in the standards and terms on, and demand for, bank loans to businesses and households over the past three months. The survey also contained special questions about changes in banks' lending standards on, and demand for, the three main types of commercial real estate (CRE) loans over the past year, and on the current levels of banks' lending standards for many types of business and household loans relative to longer-term norms. In the July survey, domestic banks, on balance, reported having eased...

This study examines the usefulness of the Taylor-rule framework as an organizing device for describing the policy debate and evolution of monetary policy in the United States. Monetary policy during the 1920s and since the 1951 Treasury-Federal Reserve Accord can be broadly interpreted in terms of this framework with rather surprising consistency. In broad terms, during these periods policy has been generally formulated in a forward- looking manner with price stability and economic stability serving as implicit or explicit guides. As early as the 1920s, measures of real economic activity...

Using data from the IMF Coordinated Portfolio Investment Surveys conducted in 2001, we analyze the determinants of 31 countries' international equity holdings. We show that investors in all countries underweight U.S. equities in their portfolios, many by more than they underweight foreign equities in general. Such behavior is surprising given the common perception of the United States as a desirable investment destination due to its well-developed legal and regulatory environment. Instead we find that investors in some countries are overweight in equities from other countries with which they...

The October 2014 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices addressed changes in the standards and terms on, and demand for, bank loans to businesses and households over the past three months. This summary discusses the responses from 76 domestic banks and 22 U.S. branches and agencies of foreign banks. Regarding loans to businesses, the October survey results indicated that only a modest net fraction of banks eased their standards for commercial and industrial (C&I) loans to firms of all sizes, but generally larger net fractions of banks eased each of the pricing terms...

We propose a hypothetical distress insurance premium (DIP) as a measure of the European banking systemic risk, which integrates the characteristics of bank size, default probability, and interconnectedness. Based on this measure, the systemic risk of European banks reached its height in late 2011 around e 500 billion. We find that the sovereign default spread is the factor driving this heightened risk in the banking sector during the European debt crisis. The methodology can also be used to identify the individual contributions of over 50 major European banks to the systemic risk measure....

Robustness and fragility in Leamer's sense are defined with respect to a particular coefficient over a class of models. This paper shows that inclusion of the data generation process in that class of models is neither necessary nor sufficient for robustness. This result holds even if the properly specified model has well-determined, statistically significant coefficients. The encompassing principle explains how this result can occur. Encompassing also provides a link to a more common-sense notion of robustness, which is still a desirable property empirically; and encompassing clarifies recent...

With the use of nontraditional policy tools, the level of reserve balances has risen significantly in the United States since 2007. Before the financial crisis, reserve balances were roughly $20 billion whereas the level has risen well past $1 trillion. The effect of reserve balances in simple macroeconomic models often comes through the money multiplier, affecting the money supply and the amount of bank lending in the economy. Most models currently used for macroeconomic policy analysis, however, either exclude money or model money demand as entirely endogenous, thus precluding any causal...

This study develops measures of emerging market credit spreads for the 1990s, based on data on new bond issues and bank loans, that cover a broader range of borrowers than the Brady bond spreads most commonly used to date. These measures are used to identify the impacts of credit ratings, maturity and currency denomination on spreads. We find important regional differences in spreads across the developing world, even after controlling for risk and maturity. We also identify the evolution of spreads during the 1990s up until the advent of the Asian financial crisis, holding other determinants...

This joint implementation plan has been prepared pursuant to section 327(a) of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Public Law 111-203 (Dodd-Frank), and is submitted to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs of the Senate, the Committee on Financial Services of the House of Representatives, and the Inspectors General of the Department of the Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Board (FRB). The FDIC, the FRB, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Office of...