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.

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.

Who are the agents of financial regulation? Is good (or bad) financial governance merely the work of legislators and regulators? Here Annelise Riles argues that financial governance is made not just through top-down laws and policies but also through the daily use of mundane legal techniques such as collateral by a variety of secondary agents, from legal technicians and retail investors to financiers and academics and even computerized trading programs. Drawing upon her ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Japanese derivatives market, Riles explores the uses of collateral in the financial markets as a regulatory device for stabilizing market transactions. How collateral operates, Riles suggests, is paradigmatic of a class of low-profile, mundane, but indispensable activities and practices that are all too often ignored as we think about how markets should work and be governed. Riles seeks to democratize our understanding of legal techniques, and demonstrate how these day-to-day private actions can be reformed to produce more effective forms of market regulation.

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

Based on detailed research and consultation with experts, including the Bank of England, this book reviews theoretical and historical debates on the nature of money and banking and explains the role of the central bank, the Government and the European Union. Following a sell out first edition and reprint, this second edition includes new sections on Libor and quantitative easing in the UK and the sovereign debt crisis in Europe.

Deleveraging has two components--shrinking of balance sheets due to increased haircuts/shedding of assets, and the reduction in the interconnectedness of the financial system. We focus on the second aspect and show that post-Lehman there has been a significant decline in the interconnectedness in the pledged collateral market between banks and nonbanks. We find that both the collateral and its associated velocity are not rebounding as of end-2011 and still about $4-5 trillion lower than the peak of $10 trillion as of end-2007. This paper updates Singh (2011) and we use this data to compare with the monetary aggregates (largely due to QE efforts in US, Euro area and UK), and discuss the overall financial lubrication that likely impacts the conduct of global monetary policy.

Sometime in the 1970s and 1980s, the use of credit cards, which had begun as a convenience, began to grow into an addiction. Collateral Damaged: The Marketing of Consumer Debt to America explains how a nation of savers became a nation of consumers and how Wall Street used consumers' addiction to spending to create the "toxic securities" that threaten to bring about the collapse of the global economy. Geisst looks at the policy implications of the credit crisis and describes how the United States can get its fiscal house in order: Debt must be brought back onto the issuer's balance sheet. Investors must have the assurance of recourse to the debt issuer's own funds, rather than the empty promise of a valueless document. Regulators must be educated to know at least as much about financial engineering as the structured finance instruments' architects do. This book connects the dots from consumer spending to credit cards to home-equity loans and back to credit cards.

An “intriguing plan” addressing shadow banking, regulation, and the continuing quest for financial stability (Financial Times). Years have passed since the world experienced one of the worst financial crises in history, and while countless experts have analyzed it, many central questions remain unanswered. Should money creation be considered a “public” or “private” activity—or both? What do we mean by, and want from, financial stability? What role should regulation play? How would we design our monetary institutions if we could start from scratch? In The Money Problem, Morgan Ricks addresses these questions and more, offering a practical yet elegant blueprint for a modernized system of money and banking—one that, crucially, can be accomplished through incremental changes to the United States’ current system. He brings a critical, missing dimension to the ongoing debates over financial stability policy, arguing that the issue is primarily one of monetary system design. The Money Problem offers a way to mitigate the risk of catastrophic panic in the future, and it will expand the financial reform conversation in the United States and abroad. “Highly recommended.” —Choice

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.