Dealers and the Dealer of Last Resort: Evidence from the Agency MBS Markets in the COVID-19 Crisis

Jiakai Chen (), Haoyang Liu (), Asani Sarkar and Zhaogang Song
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Jiakai Chen: http://www.shidler.hawaii.edu/fin/directory/jiakai-chen

No 933, Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: When market disruptions began in March 2020, dealers maintained their usual liquidity provision in the agency MBS market by absorbing cash inventory and hedging inventory risk with forward contracts. Nevertheless, cash and forward prices diverged sharply and began to converge only after the Federal Reserve implemented nonstandard purchase operations that promptly removed MBS from dealers’ balance sheets. Further cross-dealer analyses identify supplemental leverage ratio requirements as a key constraint on dealers’ balance sheets. Finally, customer selling increased precisely when price divergence reversed, contradicting the conjecture—advanced in some studies—that customer selling pressure was the primary driver of the disruptions.

Keywords: arbitrage; cash; dealer; liquidity; MBS; specified pool; TBA; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D8 G2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48
Date: 2020-07-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-fmk
Note: Revised March 2026. Previous title: “Cash-Forward Arbitrage and Dealer Capital in MBS Markets: COVID-19 and Beyond”
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