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-- this post authored by Alexander Kroeger and Asani Sarkar Bitcoin is the most popular virtual currency yet developed. Proponents assert that bitcoin can remove frictions involved in payment and settlement systems by eliminating the need for the financial intermediaries that exist in traditional currencies. In this blog post, we show that while bitcoin transfers themselves are relatively frictionless for the user, there are significant frictions when bitcoins trade in exchange markets resulting in meaningful and persistent price differences across bitcoin exchanges. These exchange-related fr...

-- this post authored by Nina Boyarchenko, Richard Crump, Anna Kovner, and Or Shachar With more than $10.4 trillion outstanding as of Q3:2020, the U.S. corporate bond market is a significant source of funding for most large U.S. corporations. While prior literature offers a variety of measures to capture different aspects of corporate bond market functioning, there is little consensus on how to use those measures to identify periods of distress in the market as a whole. In this post, we describe the U.S. Corporate Bond Market Distress Index (CMDI), which offers a single measure to quantify jo...

What is the impact of $37,000 of student debt on a worker’s life? The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) is fighting for the immediate abolition of all student debt. Join the IYSSE at iysse.com. The average student in the United States today leaves college with $37,172 of debt from student loans. All told, national college debt stands at a staggering $1.56 trillion, the highest figure ever recorded for student debt. A major factor in this immense rise in student debt has been the constant increase in college tuition, which has risen by 1,140 percent since the late ...

February Regional Business Surveys Find Widespread Supply Disruptions -- this post authored by Jason Bram and Richard Deitz Business activity increased in the region’s manufacturing sector in recent weeks but continued to decline in the region’s service sector, continuing a divergent trend seen over the past several months, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s February regional business surveys. Looking ahead, however, businesses expressed widespread optimism about the near-term outlook, with service firms increasingly confident that the business climate will be better in...

-- this post authored by Asani Sarkar Once a bank grows beyond a certain size or becomes too complex and interconnected, investors often perceive that it is “too big to fail" (TBTF), meaning that if the bank were to become distressed, the government would likely bail it out. In a recent post, I showed that the implicit funding subsidies to systemically important banks (SIBs) declined, on average, after a set of reforms for eliminating TBTF perceptions was implemented. In this post, I discuss whether these subsidies increased again during the COVID-19 pandemic and, if so, whether the increas...