Research Topics

Shadow Banking and Federal Reserve Governance in the Global Financial Crisis

The 2008 Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) transcripts provide a rare portrait of how policymakers responded to the unfolding of the world’s largest financial crisis since the Great Depression. The transcripts reveal an FOMC that lacked a satisfactory understanding of a shadow banking system that had grown to enormous proportions—an FOMC that neither comprehended the extent to which the fate of regulated member banks had become intertwined and interlinked with the shadow banking system, nor had considered in advance the implications of a serious crisis. As a consequence, the Fed had to make policy on the fly as it tried to prevent a complete collapse of the financial system.

Nicola Matthews, University of Missouri–Kansas City, presents the main findings of her research on the Fed’s lending practices following the global financial crisis of 2008. Applying Walter Bagehot’s principles, she finds that the Fed departed from the traditional lender-of-last-resort function of a central bank by lending to insolvent banks without good collateral--and below penalty rates. Most of the Fed’s emergency facilities lent at rates that were, on average, at or below market rates, with the big banks the primary beneficiaries. The Fed went beyond aiding markets to effectively making markets. Reform, Matthews concludes, is the only solution.

The Low and Extended Lending Rates that Revived the Big Banks

Walter Bagehot’s putative principles of lending in liquidity crises—to lend freely to solvent banks with good collateral but at penalty rates—have served as a theoretical basis for thinking about the lender of last resort for close to 100 years, while simultaneously providing justification for central bank real-world intervention. If we presume Bagehot’s principles to be both sound and adhered to by central bankers, we would expect to find the lending by the Fed during the global financial crisis in line with such policies. Taking Bagehot’s principles at face value, this paper aims to examine one of these principles—central bank lending at penalty rates—and to determine whether it did in fact conform to this standard. A comprehensive analysis of these rates has revealed that the Fed did not, in actuality, follow Bagehot’s classical doctrine. Consequently, the intervention not only generated moral hazard but also set the stage for another crisis. This working paper is part of the Ford Foundation project “A Research and Policy Dialogue Project on Improving Governance of the Government Safety Net in Financial Crisis” and continues the investigation of the Fed’s bailout of the financial system—the most comprehensive study of the raw data to date.