Skip to main content

Open mic night on interest rate spreads

Ok, readers. Here's a chance for you to flex your muscles. The following chart shows various short-term interest rates:


Why are these rates all so different? Can the differentials between them be arbitraged away? What sorts of institutional rigidities might be preventing arbitrage? For instance, we know certain institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can't get interest on reserves held at the Fed. What other sorts of fine details might be important? Or are the differentials between these various rates not currently open to arbitrage? Can they be explained by term risk? How much do other sorts of risk, like liquidity risk, counterparty risk, default risk etc drive spreads?  A few specific questions:

a) The DTCC Treasury General Financial Collateral (GCF) repo rate used to trade at or below the fed funds rate. The Treasury GCF repo rate is a collateralized rate. Since collateral reduces risk, it makes sense it would trade below the fed funds rate. But why is the riskier rate now below the safer rate?

b) Why does the Fed funds rate generally trade above the t-bill rate? There's presumably less term risk in the FF rate, which would imply a lower Fed funds rate. Does interbank risk account for the higher fed funds rate?

c) Is it a risk-free trade to fund oneself in the fed funds market and invest the proceeds overnight at the interest rate?

d) Why would banks hold t-bills at all if they can simply keep reserves at the Fed for a superior return of 0.25%? The credit risk seems similiar: as a bank, you're exposed to the Fed in the case of reserves, and the Treasury in the case of bills.

e) Sometimes the 4-week t-bill yield crosses over the 3-month. Why? The credit risk is the same, and presumably bills are equally liquid. Are these inversions purely related to expected changes in yields?

Data, ideas, links,etc all much appreciated. I'm sure I'll have more questions in the comments, or if you have other interesting observations, go for it.

[Update 22/03/2013: I reinputted the Treasury GCF rate since my original data was off]

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A way to make anonymous online donations

Paying for things online usually means giving up plenty of privacy. But this needn't always be the case. Last night I donated to a local charity via their website and didn't have to give up any of my personal information. The trick for achieving a degree of online payments anonymity? Not bitcoin, Zcash, or Monero. I used a product created by old fashioned bankers: a non-reloadable prepaid debit card. (I wrote about these cards here and here ). Had I used a credit card or PayPal, all sorts of parties would have gotten access to my personal information including the site owner, the payments processor, my bank, the site owner's bank, the credit card networks, my partner, and many more. To get a good feel for how many different parties touch an online payment, check out this graphic by Rebecka Ricks, which shows how PayPal shares your information. A powerful visualization by @baricks showing how PayPal shares your data: https://t.co/vd8w8d8xn6 ht @akadiyala Due to Europe...

Stock as a medium of exchange

American Depository Receipt (ADR) for Sony Corp You've heard the story before. It goes something like this. There's one unique good in this world that serves as a universal vehicle by which we conduct every one of our economic transactions. We call this good "money". Quarrels often start over what items get lumped together as money, but paper currency and deposits usually make the grade. If we want to convert the things that we've produced into desirable consumption goods (or long-term savings vehicles like stocks), we need to pass through this intervening "money" medium to get there. This of course is fiction—there never has been an item that served as a universal medium of exchange. Rather, all valuable things serve to some degree or other as a medium of exchange; or, put differently, everything is money. What follows are several examples illustrating this idea. Rather than using currency/deposits as the intervening medium to get to their desired final...

Buoyant Ireland

Nick Rowe is pessimistic , and points to one of the dreariest articles I've read to date on the Europe situation. I noticed that Ireland seems to be doing much better than the other peripherals. See the chart below. Its stock market is relatively strong, having outperformed markets in Greece, Italy, and Spain while keeping up to the German DAX. At the same time, Ireland isn't seeing capital outflows anymore. While Greece, Spain and Italy's TARGET2 balance is deteriorating, Ireland's has been improving for over a year. (Note that data is to end of April). ( click here for expanded version) What are the Irish doing differently? Is Ireland presaging how the other peripherals might be stabilized, or are they just lagging behind? Note: For one explanation of the difference, see this Allied Irish Bank report ( pdf ).