Sunday, July 28, 2013

Bexley Comedy Writers Guild meeting set for September 2, 2013.

Bexley Comedy Writers Guild meeting at Bexley Public Radio set for 3:30 p.m. Monday September 2, 2013.

The meeting location will be announced on the prior Friday morning to individuals who RSVP by the prior Thursday.

Community residents are welcome. 

Admission is $35.00 per person.

Cash, check, money order and ID.

Please RSVP to wcrxlp@yahoo.com or voice mail to (614) 235-2929 no later than the Thursday prior to the meeting.

Bexley Comedy Writers Guild is a public  committee of
Bexley Public Radio Foundation
2700 E. Main St., Suite 208
Columbus, OH 43209

Ohio Public Media Cooperative meeting set for September 2, 2013.

Ohio Public Media Cooperative meeting at Bexley Public Radio set for 4:00 p.m. Monday September 2, 2013.

The meeting location will be announced on the prior Friday morning to individuals who RSVP by the prior Thursday.

Community residents are welcome. 

Admission is $10.00 per person.

Cash, check, money order and ID.

Please RSVP to wcrxlp@yahoo.com or voice mail to (614) 235-2929 no later than the Thursday prior to the meeting.

Ohio Public Media Cooperative is a public  committee of
Bexley Public Radio Foundation
2700 E. Main St., Suite 208
Columbus, OH 43209

WCRX-LP Community programming advisory committee meeting set for September 2, 2013.

WCRX-LP Community Programming Advisory Committee meeting for Bexley Public Radio set for 4:30 p.m. Monday September 2, 2013.

The meeting location will be announced on the prior Friday morning to individuals who RSVP by the prior Thursday.

Community residents are welcome. 

Admission is $5.00 per person.

Cash, check, money order and ID.

Please RSVP to wcrxlp@yahoo.com or voice mail to (614) 235-2929 no later than the Thursday prior to the meeting.

Community Programming Advisory Committee is a public  committee of
Bexley Public Radio Foundation
2700 E. Main St., Suite 208
Columbus, OH 43209

Friday, July 19, 2013

The Green Dignity Movement DEADLINE FOR NOMINATIONS Thursday August 15 , 2013.

The Green Dignity Movement.

One bag at a time, saved and recycled is all that it takes.

Each bag alone seems insignificant; a mere drop in the bucket. But the action of saving each bag is what it takes to turn around the piles of waste that modernity throws our way.

The Green Dignity Movement recognizes the individuals who take the time to recycle plastic grocery bags and awards cash prizes to those people who are outstanding in their recycling efforts.


Saving plastic grocery bags is an important part of saving the earth.

If you know someone who deserves recognition for his recycling of plastic grocery bags (either white or brown), nominate him for a cash or other award of something of value. Give us his name, address and telephone number and tell us why you think he should be rewarded for his grocery bag recycling efforts.

Selection of winner will be by random drawing Friday August 16, 2013.  Winner's name will be posted on this blog.


HELP BEXLEY PUBLIC RADIO PAY FOR AN ANTENNA STUDY TO UPGRADE ITS ANTENNA. SEND YOUR MONEY PROMPTLY. BE GENEROUS.

Bexley Public Radio Foundation broadcasting as
WCRX-LP, 102.1 FM, Local Power Radio
2700 E. Main St., Suite 208
Columbus, OH 43209
Voice (614) 235 2929
Fax (614) 235 3008
Email wcrxlp@yahoo.com
Blog http://agentofcurrency.blogspot.com

Bexley Public Radio Foundation is exempt from federal taxes under IRC Section 501(c)(3). Donations are deductible from federal income taxes for individuals who itemize. Checks may identify the payee as Bexley Public Radio Foundation or WCRX-LP, 102.1 FM.

Design is copyright 2011. All rights reserved. Bexley Public Radio Foundation. Text is copyright 2013. All rights reserved. Bexley Public Radio Editorial Collective.
 Shadow Banking

July  18, 2013
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Authors: Zoltan Pozsar, Tobias Adrian, Adam Ashcraft, and Hayley Boesky

The rapid growth of the market-based financial system since the mid-1980s has changed the nature of financial intermediation. Within the system, “shadow banks” have served a critical role, especially in the run-up to the recent financial crisis. Shadow banks are financial intermediaries that conduct maturity, credit, and liquidity transformation without explicit access to central bank liquidity or public sector credit guarantees. This article documents the institutional features of shadow banks, discusses the banks’ economic roles, and analyzes their relation to the traditional banking system. The authors argue that an understanding of the “plumbing” of the shadow banking system is an important underpinning for any study of financial system interlinkages. They observe that while many current and future reform efforts are focused on remediating the excesses of the recent credit bubble, increased capital and liquidity standards for depository institutions and insurance companies are likely to heighten the returns to shadow banking activity. Thus, shadow banking is expected to be a significant part of the financial system, although very likely in a different form, for the foreseeable future.
Online Appendixes
These appendixes, which depict graphically the processes described in the article, offer a comprehensive look at the shadow banking system and its many components.
Map: The Shadow Banking System
Appendix 1: The Government-Sponsored Shadow Banking System
Appendix 2: The Credit Intermediation Process of Bank Holding Companies
Appendix 3: The Credit Intermediation Process of Diversified Broker-Dealers
Appendix 4: The Independent Specialists-Based Credit Intermediation Process
Appendix 5: The Independent Specialists-Based Credit Intermediation Process
Appendix 6: The Spectrum of Shadow Banks within a Spectrum of Shadow Credit Intermediation
Appendix 7: The Pre-Crisis Backstop of the Shadow Credit Intermediation Process
Appendix 8: The Post-Crisis Backstop of the Shadow Banking System

Magnifying the Risk of Fire Sales  in the Tri-party Repo Market

July 17, 2013
Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Liberty Street Economics

Leyla Alkan, Vic Chakrian, Adam Copeland, Isaac Davis, and Antoine Martin

The fragility inherent in the tri-party repo market came to light during the 2008-09 financial crisis. One of the main vulnerabilities is the risk of fire sales, which can be enhanced by the response of some investors to stress events. Money market mutual funds (MMFs) and the agents investing cash collateral obtained from securities lending (SLs) are thought to behave, in times of stress, in ways that exacerbate fire-sale risks in the tri-party repo market. Based on detailed investor data, we find that MMFs and SLs constitute almost half of the investor market, making it crucial for tri-party repo participants and regulators to account for MMF and SL investment behavior when considering how to mitigate the risk of fire sales.

How Investors Can Compound Fire-Sale Risks
A recent New York Fed staff report details the risks of fire sales in the tri-party repo market. The first risk, termed pre-default fire-sale risk, occurs when a dealer is under stress, but has not defaulted. A stressed dealer may be forced to sell its securities quickly, an action that likely depresses market prices and creates fire-sale conditions. Tri-party repo investors can aggravate this risk by quickly withdrawing funding from a troubled dealer, and so forcing that dealer to sell even more securities quickly.

        The second risk, termed post-default fire-sale risk, occurs after a dealer default, when that dealer’s investors receive the repo securities in lieu of repayment. Fire sales can then occur if investors attempt to liquidate these securities in an uncoordinated and rapid pace. In this scenario, investors as a group will be trying to sell off a substantial amount of collateral at the same time.

        Two categories of tri-party repo investors, MMFs and SLs, have business models that increase the likelihood of both types of fire-sale risks in the tri-party repo market. This is because both investor types are particularly susceptible to their own liquidity pressures.

        MMFs are a class of mutual funds that invests in relatively safe financial assets, with a short maturity. Nevertheless, MMFs can be subject to runs when perceived by shareholders to have worrisome risk exposures, such as when lending cash to a stressed dealer (see this post on the vulnerabilities of MMFs).

        Securities lending refers to a collateralized loan of a security between two entities. In the United States, these loans are typically collateralized with cash. For that reason, securities lenders often hold large pools of cash collateral, which they reinvest in money markets, including the tri-party repo market, to enhance their return. Most securities loans in the United States are done on an open maturity basis, which means that the lender of a security has to return the cash collateral whenever the borrower of the security returns it. This arrangement can create liquidity pressures on the cash reinvestment funds of securities lenders that may have placed their cash in longer-term trades and/or less liquid assets (see this article in our Current Issues series on the risks associated with the reinvestment of cash collateral).

        Other types of investors in tri-party repo, such as trusts, investment managers, and pensions, do not face these liquidity pressures (or at least not to the same extent). So, when faced with a dealer under stress, MMFs and SLs face stronger incentives to stop lending immediately, in order to avoid ending up with collateral in lieu of cash. This withdrawal of funding, however, raises the probability of pre-default fire-sale risk and further pushes the dealer towards default. The same liquidity pressures also push MMFs and SLs to sell the repo securities they receive from a defaulting dealer as quickly as possible, increasing the probability of a post-default fire sale.


Proportion of Investor Types
Because the liquidity pressures faced by MMFs and SLs propel them to take actions that increase the probability of fire sale, it is important for market participants and regulators to know the prevalence of these investor types in the tri-party repo market. Past estimates, based on conversations with market participants, had MMFs accounting for a quarter to a third of all tri-party repo activity, and SLs with another quarter.

        Using detailed supervisory data, we estimated that MMFs account for about 32 percent of all funds invested in tri-party repo and SLs account for about 14 percent of the total. These calculations are based on a snapshot of investor activity on October 10, 2012, but we found similar results using data from September and November of 2012. Included in “all others” are mutual funds, banks, investment managers, trusts, pensions, municipalities, and other institutions. None of these other investor types represents more than 10 percent of the market individually.


Copeland_table


        We categorized investors into various types based upon their name. For MMFs and SLs, this categorization was fairly straightforward. Because there is significant concentration in the MMF and SL industries, the above results are mainly driven by categorizing the top fifty MMFs and SLs. Hence, the errors associated with miscategorizing smaller MMFs or SLs with obscure or ambivalent names are small and do not impact the results presented in the table. There were a few larger investors that looked to be SLs but, because we could not be sure, we classified elsewhere. Because of this decision, we believe our approach may underestimate the extent of SL participation in the tri-party repo market.

        By our calculations, MMFs and SLs are the two largest classes of investors, together representing just about half of the market. Their dominant presence heightens the risk of both pre- and post-default fire sales, so it is important for market participants and regulators to take this fact into account when evaluating tools to address the fire-sale vulnerability in the tri-party repo market.


Disclaimer
The views expressed in this post are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.





  Alkan_leyla
Leyla Alkan is a bank examiner in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Financial Institution Supervision Group.

  Chakrian_vic
Vic Chakrian is an assistant vice president in the Financial Institution Supervision Group.


  Copeland_adam
Adam Copeland is a senior economist in the Research and Statistics Group.


  Davis_isaac
Isaac Davis is a research analyst in the Research and Statistics Group.


  Martin_antoine
Antoine Martin is a vice president in the Research and Statistics Group.

Improving Access to Refinancing Opportunities for Underwater Mortgages

July 15, 2013
Federal Reserve Bank of New York,  Liberty Street Economics

Joshua Abel and Joseph Tracy 

Since the onset of the housing crisis, a focus of policymakers has been to help underwater homeowners lower their monthly mortgage payments by refinancing, principally through the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP). This enables households to commit more money to consumption, debt reduction, and saving. Lower monthly payments also decrease the risk of mortgage defaults, allowing homeowners to stay in their homes and reducing expected losses for mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which remain under conservatorship of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Stanching the flow of defaults also helps to firm up the housing market and, therefore, the economy as a whole. In this post, we examine some simple adjustments to HARP that would help to continue the program’s recent success and provide additional support to the housing market recovery—in undertaking that has added significance with the recent increase in mortgage rates, which could hamper refinancing activity moving forward.

        Recent home price appreciation has benefited homeowners in most parts of the country. However, millions of homeowners still find themselves with little or no equity in their homes, the result of the earlier steep decline in home prices. Without sufficient equity, it can be very difficult to refinance, which means that these homeowners cannot take advantage of the current low interest rate environment.

        HARP is designed to allow borrowers who are current on their payments and whose existing mortgages are guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac to refinance even if their loan-to-value (LTV) ratios are above the 80 percent level that is typically required for prime mortgages. Since HARP’s inception in April 2009, about 2.5 million homeowners have used the program. Much of this success has come since a 2012 redesign (the so-called HARP 2.0). Among other things, this redesign removed the 125 percent LTV limit on HARP refinances, opening the program to borrowers more deeply underwater. The chart below showing a sharp uptick in participation in 2012 makes clear how important that policy change was.


Monthly-HARP


        It could be time to consider further program changes. Currently, HARP can only be utilized by borrowers whose mortgages were obtained by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac by June 1, 2009. Additionally, borrowers are only allowed to use HARP once, meaning that borrowers who have already done so are now ineligible. We find that altering these rules could heighten refinancing activity substantially. To evaluate the potential benefit from relaxing these two program restrictions, we take a random sample of loans and select those that are eligible (backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, current on payments, and other criteria). We then say that a loan is in-the-money to use HARP if refinancing would decrease the monthly payment enough so that the borrower can recoup the costs of refinancing, such as the appraisal cost and program fees, within three years. We repeat this exercise using different eligibility rules, such as moving the cutoff date from June 1, 2009, and allowing “reHARPing” (refinancing a second time under HARP).

        The table below summarizes our results as of February. We estimate that about 1.5 million borrowers are eligible and in-the-money for HARP under current guidelines. Shifting the cutoff date—to 2010, 2011, 2012, and then removing it entirely— adds substantially to this number, though at a decreasing rate. Our analysis shows that eliminating the cutoff date entirely would add 530,000 in-the-money borrowers, an increase of over 30 percent. If reHARPing were also allowed, this increase would climb to over 55 percent.


Abel-table


        Note that on the whole, the reduction in monthly payments for these additional borrowers would be lower than for those that are currently eligible, due to the fact that mortgage rates have declined substantially since 2009, meaning their contract rates are already somewhat lower. However, an extra $200 per month could make a significant difference for many individual homeowners and for the macroeconomy, when aggregated. Although heightened refinancing activity will lower returns for investors in agency mortgage-backed securities, the macro effects of additional money in homeowners’ pockets more than offset those losses, meaning that refinancing is not simply a zero-sum transfer from investors to borrowers, as discussed in an earlier post.

        Furthermore, there is reason to believe that these program changes could provide a bigger boost than our numbers imply. Consider that the table above provides estimates of how many borrowers have incentive to refinance, not how many will actually do so. Predicting the “take-up” rate—the fraction of in-the-money borrowers who will actually complete a HARP refinance—is a difficult exercise. However, it seems reasonable to believe that the take-up rate among newly eligible borrowers (if, say, the cutoff date was moved) will be a lot higher than for those who are already eligible, but have so far decided not to participate despite the financial incentive to do so. There are various reasons why someone may not participate: lack of information about the program, lack of financial sophistication, or plans to move from the house in the near-term, among others. All of these are unobservable in the data, but eligible borrowers, by not responding to the incentive up to this point, have revealed that some or all of these effects may be at work. Others have not used HARP simply because they have not been allowed, and it is likely that many will rush to do so when given the chance. In fact, there’s evidence for this in our first chart: borrowers with LTV ratios greater than 125 percent became newly eligible in 2012, with a tremendous influx of these borrowers into the program soon after.

        The recent improvement in the housing market is welcome news, but it has not erased the negative equity problem brought on by the housing bust. One of the consequences is that many borrowers are still trapped paying interest rates far above the current market rate. HARP is a sensible response to this problem for borrowers with agency mortgages, and changes to the HARP program in 2012 increased the effectiveness of the program. Some additional changes to that program could build on the recent success of HARP and provide ongoing support for the housing market recovery.





Addendum
(July 18, 2013)

The above analysis assumed that a borrower could refinance into a thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage with a rate of 4.0 percent. After receiving reader comments, we have updated the table assuming that a borrower now could refinance into a mortgage rate of 4.5 percent. This 50 basis point increase in the mortgage rate reduces the impacts associated with each proposed program change. For example, removing the origination date deadline would now add an estimated 264,000 additional in-the-money borrowers, a 50 percent reduction from the earlier 530,000. For those borrowers who remain in-the-money, the higher assumed mortgage rate also reduces the extent to which a HARP refinance will lower their monthly mortgage payment. Again, looking at the case of removing the origination date deadline, the reduction in the average monthly payment is an estimated $161, a 12 percent decline from the earlier $182.


Comments_table_wider


Disclaimer
The views expressed in this post are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.

Joshua Abel is a former research associate in the Research and Statistics Group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.


Tracy_josephJoseph Tracy is an executive vice president and senior advisor to the Bank president at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.


Sunday, July 14, 2013

What’s New At Bexley Public Library: Why Jazz Happened by Marc Myers.




Author Marc Myers writes about jazz, rock, soul and rhythm & blues.  His writing appears frequently in the Wall Street Journal. 

Myers' most recent book Why Jazz Happened is a business history of an American art form.  It is a story of musicians, music agents, copyright agencies, a labor union, the federal government, broadcast engineers and manufacturers of record players and juke boxes,  the GI Bill, colleges and music schools.

Myers’ history covers ten forms of jazz:  Bebop, jazz-classical, cool, West Coast jazz, hard bop, jazz-gospel, spiritual jazz, jazz-pop, avant-garde jazz and jazz-rock fusion.  He explains why these forms of music developed and identifies the musicians who are identified with these ten forms of jazz. 

In addition to the ten listed jazz forms, Myers also mentions some other forms briefly.  These other forms are identified as free-jazz, concert jazz and chamber jazz.

The history that Myers writes includes The American Federation of Musicians, the American Federation of Labor, and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.  Musicians.

Particular American cities that were important locales for the music are Chicago, New Orleans, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. 

Schools in those cities, such as Julliard, Manhattan School of Music, Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and Arts and Westlake School of Music were influential in training the musicians who played the new music. 

There was an important interplay between the classical music training received at these school and the development of the sound of jazz.

Myers book is a well-written description of the business of jazz during its formative years and the time-period of its growth as an American form of music.

For a summer read, this is an easy recommendation.  It is a history that fills in a lot of gaps in  our understanding of where jazz came from and how it grew and sustained itself.

July 14, 2013. 
Reviewed at Bexley, Ohio.
Copyright 2013 by Bexley Public Radio Foundation.  All rights Reserved
The WCRX-LP Editorial Collective.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Bank holding companies, common stock repurchase during financial crises.

July 10, 2013


 

 

New York Federal Reserve 

Liberty Street Economics

 Common Stock Repurchases during the Financial Crisis

Beverly Hirtle

      Summary:  Large bank holding companies (BHCs) continued to pay dividends to their shareholders well after the onset of the recent financial crisis. Academics, industry analysts, and policymakers have noted that these payments reduced capital at these firms at a time when there was considerable uncertainty about the full extent of losses facing individual banks and the banking industry. But dividends are not the only means to return capital to shareholders; stock repurchases serve much the same function. In this post, I examine common stock repurchases by large BHCs during the financial crisis and show that they behaved very differently from common stock dividends during the same period. While dividends remained relatively constant through late 2008, common stock repurchases dropped quickly after the beginning of the financial crisis, consistent with their historically tighter sensitivity to current performance and financial conditions.


BHC Dividends during the Financial Crisis

      Many analysts and researchers have noted that large BHCs did not reduce common stock dividends until the financial crisis was well under way. For instance, in a study examining capital at large U.S. and European banks, securities firms, and U.S. government-sponsored enterprises, Acharya, Gujral, Kulkarni, and Shin show that dividends at these firms did not decrease significantly until early 2009. In an October 2008 New York Times op-ed piece, Scharfstein and Stein argued that dividend payments by the largest U.S. BHCs would “redirect more than $25 billion of the $125 billion [in TARP capital] to shareholders in the next year alone.” Both sets of authors argued that continued high dividend payments undercut the capitalization of the U.S. banking industry during a time of stress. In 2011, the Federal Reserve implemented the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) to review planned dividend payments and other capital distributions by large BHCs to ensure that they would retain sufficient capital to withstand stressed economic and financial market conditions even after making such distributions to shareholders (see my earlier post for a description of how the CCAR addresses this objective).

        Regulatory report data confirm the findings about dividends from these earlier studies. The first chart (below) shows the quarterly history of dividends declared by large U.S. BHCs—those with at least $10 billion in assets—from 2005 to the end of 2009. This period starts two years before the onset of the crisis in mid-2007 and extends until the beginning stages of the recovery at the end of 2009. (For consistency over the period, the sample excludes the large nonbank financial firms that became BHCs in early 2009.) As the chart shows, large BHCs made dividend payments in the range of $9 billion to $12 billion per quarter from 2005 to 2007, and while dividends declined over the course of 2008, they did not fall significantly below this level until early 2009, more than a year into the financial crisis.


Common_stock_dividends


Dividends Are Not the Whole Story

      Focusing just on dividends misses an important part of the story, however. Stock repurchases—when a company buys its own common stock in public or private markets or by tender offer—are another important way that a firm can return capital to shareholders. Like dividend payments, stock repurchases disperse cash from the company to shareholders. Moreover, repurchases reduce the amount of common stock outstanding one-for-one, just as dividend payments do. Dividend payments reduce retained earnings and thus reduce (potential) common equity, while stock repurchases are a direct reduction in the outstanding amount of common equity.

     The second chart (below) updates the first one to include common stock repurchases for the sample of large BHCs. Both dividend and repurchase information come from the quarterly FR Y-9C regulatory reports, which contain balance sheet and income statement information for BHCs. While the Y-9C reports collect dividends declared as a distinct line item, repurchases are not reported directly and must be inferred from other information contained in the report. For the second chart, I’ve used BHC purchases of treasury stock—common stock issued but not held by the public—as a proxy for common stock repurchases. This is a noisy measure of repurchases, as it may omit some repurchase activity that is reported as part of other Y-9C line items. However, it is a reasonable proxy that should capture the broad movements in repurchase activity.


Repurchased


        The second chart illustrates several notable aspects of repurchase activity by large BHCs. First, in the period leading up to the financial crisis, stock repurchases were significant, averaging $7.5 billion per quarter and peaking at $12 billion in the first quarter of 2007. Stock repurchases were about two-thirds the size of dividend payments over this period, meaning that total distributions to shareholders were substantially higher than indicated by considering dividends alone. This is not something new in the banking industry. Some of my earlier research, which examined BHC stock repurchases during the 1990s, also found that stock repurchases rivaled dividends as a way for BHCs to return capital to shareholders. Second, share repurchases dropped sharply during the early phases of the financial crisis, several quarters before dividends were significantly reduced. Stock repurchases by large BHCs fell from their peak of $12 billion in the first quarter of 2007 to about $2 billion during the first quarter of 2008, and were at negligible levels after the middle of that year. As noted above, dividends did not decrease significantly until early 2009.

     Because of the decline in repurchases, large BHCs’ overall capital distributions to shareholders declined steadily over the course of 2007 and 2008, a somewhat different picture than the one that emerges by looking at dividends alone. By the beginning of 2008, overall capital distributions had fallen below the levels that prevailed during the pre-crisis period. Even so, as the second chart illustrates, it was not until early 2009, when dividends also declined sharply, that overall distributions fell to the very low levels that ultimately prevailed for the remainder of the financial crisis and the period that followed.

Why Are Repurchases Different?

      Why did stock repurchases fall earlier and more sharply than dividend payments? Part of the explanation is likely owing to the differing nature of dividends and share repurchases. Dividends are publicly visible actions requiring regular authorization by a firm’s board of directors. In the banking industry, large BHCs typically declare dividends quarterly and announced them publicly in press releases. In contrast, for all firms, stock repurchases are much less transparent. Firms have the ability to select the timing and amount of repurchases flexibly over time, subject to the details of their repurchase programs. Research on nonfinancial firms has documented that stock repurchases generally vary more over time than dividends, with repurchases used more frequently by firms with volatile earnings, especially following periods of higher-than-expected profitability. My earlier research on repurchases in the banking industry in the 1990s also found that repurchases seemed to rise following periods of higher-than-average financial performance. In contrast, dividends tend to be interpreted as signals of long-term profitability, decreasing only when profits seem likely to fall to a lower level for a sustained period of time.

     Much further research is needed to come to a full understanding of the decisions BHCs made regarding dividend and repurchase activity during the financial crisis. The charts in this post and the results of previous research provide some insight, but there is significant room to explore issues such as concerns about signaling financial weakness during a time of uncertainty, the role of herding behavior in the timing and extent of dividend reductions, and the relative impact of market-wide versus firm-specific factors in decisions to cut back on stock repurchases. And, looking ahead, supervisory oversight via the CCAR and the adoption of new regulatory capital standards that explicitly require reductions in capital distributions as regulatory capital ratios fall below certain trigger points will significantly affect BHCs’ decisions about capital distributions. In sum, it is important to consider both dividends and stock repurchases in order to understand the impact of capital distributions on the banking industry, since large BHCs actively use both to manage their capital and distribute cash to shareholders.

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the author.





Beverly_hirtleBeverly Hirtle is a senior vice president in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group.