Project

A Trading Mechanism to Increase Intermediation Capacity in the Repo Market

The US Treasuries repo market is the largest financial market in the world. Trade volume is constrained by the interaction of accounting rules requiring broker-dealers, who intermediate the market, to increase assets with each repo trade and leverage regulations that lower-bound the ratio of capital to assets. There is concern that the cap on repo volume will raise Treasuries yields, reduce the effectiveness of Fed monetary policy and elevate the risk of market disruptions. We propose a mechanism that novates decentralized repo contracts, multilaterally nets trades and assigns the remaining trades to different counterparties, trade volume and terms. The replacement contracts replicate the same flows of objects between agents as the initial contracts and leave counterparty risk unchanged. The difference is that the balance-sheet impact of the netted trade volume is reduced, which increases the intermediation capacity of broker-dealers.