Is Risk Rising in the Tri-Party Repo Market?

At the New York Fed, we follow the repo market closely and, with some of my colleagues, I’ve tried to keep readers of this blog informed about how the market works, how it’s being reformed, and what risks remain. We’re always encouraged when others share our interest in this market, so we read a recent Fitch report—“Repo Emerges from the ‘Shadow’”—closely (the report is available at www.fitchratings.com). At first glance, the report is a bit worrisome, as it argues that the repo market has recently seen a large increase in riskier types of collateral. So we decided to take a close look at some data to see if we could validate this finding. In this post, I use data made publicly available by the Tri-Party Repo Infrastructure Reform Task Force (the Task Force) to show that there is in fact no evidence of a broad-based increase in riskier types of collateral. The Task Force’s objective in publishing the data was to give a comprehensive view of the market, so the data represent 100 percent of the market’s volume. In contrast, the Fitch study is based on data from a sample of prime funds, representing only 5 percent of the market’s size.