Using Reverse Repurchase Agreements

The buy-back contract, or “repo,” the market is an opaque but important part of the financial system, which has recently attracted increasing attention. On average, $2 trillion to $4 trillion in pension transactions are traded every day — guaranteed short-term loans. But how does the pension market work, and what about it? Pension agreements have a risk profile similar to all securities lending transactions. That is, they are relatively safe transactions, since they are secured credits, which are generally used as custodians by a third party. Under a pension contract, the Federal Reserve (Fed) buys U.S. Treasury bonds, U.S. agency securities or mortgage-backed securities from a primary trader who agrees to buy them back within one to seven days; an inverted deposit is the opposite. This is how the Fed describes these transactions from the perspective of the counterparty and not from its own point of view. What are the reverse repurchase agreement (RRPs) operations carried out by the desk? The Open Market Trading Desk (the Desk) of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (Fed of New York) is responsible for setting up open market operations under the approval and management of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). A reverse repurchase agreement, executed by the desk and also called “reverse-repo” or “RRP,” is a transaction in which the desk sells a guarantee to an eligible counterparty with the repurchase agreement of the same security at a certain price at a given time in the future. The difference between the sale price and the purchase price, as well as the duration between the sale and purchase, imply an interest rate paid by the Federal Reserve for the transaction. Between 2008 and 2014, the Fed introduced quantitative easing (QE) to stimulate the economy. The Fed has built up reserves to buy securities, which has significantly increased its balance sheet and the supply of reserves to the banking system.

As a result, the pre-crisis framework was no longer working, so the Fed moved to a “broad reserve” framework with new instruments – interest on excess reserves (IORR) and overnight deposits (ONRRP), the two interest rates that the Fed itself sets – to control its main short-term interest rate. In January 2019, the Federal Reserve`s open market committee – the Fed`s policy committee – confirmed that it “intends to continue to implement monetary policy in a regime where a sufficient reserve offer will ensure that control of the level of the Federal Funds and other short-term interest rates is primarily through the setting of interest rates managed by the Federal Reserve and in which active management of the federal reserve reserve is not necessary.” When the Fed ended its asset buyback program in 2014, the supply of excess reserves in the banking system began to shrink.

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