Self-fulfilling fire sales and market backstops

Harkeerit Kalsi (), Nicholas Vause and Nora Wegner ()
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Harkeerit Kalsi: University of Cambridge
Nora Wegner: Bank of England, Postal: Bank of England, Threadneedle Street, London, EC2R 8AH

No 1020, Bank of England working papers from Bank of England

Abstract: Motivated by the March 2020 ‘dash for cash’, we build a model in which a potential liquidity shock to bond funds can prompt a self-fulfilling fire sale in the presence of a dealer with limited trading capacity. Following the global games literature, we derive the probability of a self-fulfilling fire sale. Introducing a central bank market backstop policy, we show that if the central bank can credibly commit to (i) set the size of its potential asset purchases high enough and (ii) its price discount low enough, then it can eliminate self-fulfilling fire sales without having to purchase any bonds. If the central bank acts less aggressively, it can still reduce the probability of a self-fulfilling fire sale. However, in response to the policy, funds choose to hold more bonds, which increases the probability of a self-fulfilling fire sale and reduces the effectiveness of the market backstop.

Keywords: Market backstops; fire sales; bond purchases (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2023-06-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban and nep-cba
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boe:boeewp:1020

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