Liquidity Dependence and the Waxing and Waning of Central Bank Balance Sheets
When the Federal Reserve (Fed) expanded its balance sheet via quantitative easing (QE), commercial banks typically financed reserve holdings with uninsured demandable deposits. They also issued credit lines to corporations. In the aggregate, these bank-issued claims on liquidity did not shrink commensurately when the Fed halted QE and turned to quantitative tightening (QT). Consequently, banks that increased liquidity risk exposure – especially small and regional banks – became vulnerable to liquidity shocks, necessitating further liquidity provision by the Fed. The evidence suggests that the expansion and shrinkage of central bank balance sheets has led to liquidity dependence of banks on central banks.
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Copy CitationViral V. Acharya, Rahul S. Chauhan, Raghuram Rajan, and Sascha Steffen, "Liquidity Dependence and the Waxing and Waning of Central Bank Balance Sheets," NBER Working Paper 31050 (2023), https://doi.org/10.3386/w31050.Download Citation
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Non-Technical Summaries
- In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007–09, the Federal Reserve embarked on an ambitious program of quantitative easing (QE...
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