Miruna-Daniela Ivan, Joshua Lillis, Eduardo Maqui and Carlos Cañon Salazar
Funding markets are essential for wholesome and energetic monetary establishments, and consequently for everybody within the financial system. The repurchase settlement (repo) market performs a key function in financial institution and non-bank monetary establishments’ (NBFIs’) every day actions by facilitating short-term financing and threat hedging. On this publish, we use novel Securities Financing Transaction Regulation (SFTR) information to spotlight new, and corroborate earlier, stylised repo haircut info.
What are repos? Why have they got haircuts? And why will we care?
A repo transaction is the simultaneous sale of, and ahead settlement to repurchase, securities at a particular worth, at a future date (Duffie (1996)). The vendor receives money in trade for the securities, whereas the customer earns a return on the money lent. The agreed worth of repo transactions is often decrease than the market worth of the safety used as collateral, and the distinction is named a ‘haircut’. Our evaluation will present haircuts primarily reply to counterparty credit score threat, however will even mirror a variety of threat, eg market and liquidity dangers.
Repo markets help worth discovery and enhance liquidity in quite a lot of markets, however they will additionally pose dangers to monetary stability. They usually contain companies taking (or extending) leverage and may create liquidity and maturity mismatches. They are often uncovered to run-like occasions – which the function of collateral can amplify. Given the function repo markets performed throughout earlier systemic episodes, eg the worldwide monetary disaster (GFC), the 2020 ‘sprint for money’, and the 2022 liability-driven funding (LDI) disaster, central banks and regulators monitor them carefully.
From earlier work we all know some stylised info about haircuts within the repo market, eg Kotidis and van Horen (2018), Julliard et al (2022), and Hüser et al (2024). Haircuts depend upon counterparty traits, eg they are typically bigger for companies with larger (perceived) credit score threat. Haircuts additionally depend upon the traits of the underlying collateral. They’re sometimes bigger for longer maturity contracts, for larger Worth at Danger (VaR) collateral, and the place collateral is concentrated.
New information, new insights…
Enhancing information assortment has been a key a part of post-GFC regulatory initiatives to higher perceive securities financing markets. Beneath the Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR) (launched in 2019), the Financial institution of England receives transaction-level information on securities financing transactions from all UK-based individuals. It goals to enhance the transparency of markets and to allow higher monitoring of dangers.
SFTR information present new insights into an space that helps core secondary market exercise just like the money gilt market, together with that by non-bank market individuals. Haircut information in SFTR is extra complete and of upper high quality than different current sources. Improved market protection and haircut reporting permits us to interrupt down repo haircuts by collateral sort (eg gilts), maturity, and sector. It additionally supplies new data on non-gilt government-bond repo markets, enabling us to check gilt haircuts to different core markets like US treasury securities.
Who’s out there for (bilateral) gilt repo?
Exercise within the bilateral gilt repo market is broadly concentrated within the dealer-to-client phase of the market. Sellers embody prime brokers and different banks that sometimes prolong money lending to NBFI shoppers that depend on the bilateral gilt repo marketplace for their liquidity and collateral operations. As in Hüser et al (2024), we discover cash market funds (MMFs) make up the biggest share of common every day quantity (round 33%). They’re vital (web) lenders of money – primarily within the in a single day phase of the repo market – to sellers. In flip, MMFs obtain medium (7–20 yr) and long-dated (>20 yr) gilts.
Along with earlier findings, SFTR information present that hedge funds (HFs) make up the second largest share of common every day quantity (round 30%), being energetic on either side of the repo market; the common tenor of this lending is between one and two weeks. HFs have been more and more energetic in authorities bond markets globally over the previous decade, with an acceleration in exercise over the past couple of years.
SFTR information largely corroborate this. Chart 1 illustrates the construction of the bilateral gilt repo market throughout monetary sectors. Flows of the identical (totally different) color because the sector within the outer ring present money lending (borrowing) by (from) that sector. The width of the flows – indicated by the numbers within the outer ring – mirror the dimensions of excellent money lending and borrowing (in £ billions). We see a bigger share of excellent HF bilateral gilt repo money lending in comparison with MMFs as a result of longer common tenor. Different NBFI individuals within the bilateral gilt repo market embody asset managers (AMs), insurance coverage firms and pension funds (PFs), in addition to LDI funds and different monetary establishments (OFIs).
New findings from SFTR information additionally point out that non-dealer to non-dealer transactions characterize a small fraction of whole exercise. Chart 1 reveals that almost all excellent transactions involving non-dealer counterparties are intermediated by sellers. Inter-dealer exercise is substantial, proven by the within-sector gray move for sellers. This highlights their key function as money lenders within the gilt repo market, which could be essential during times of stress.
Chart 1: Monetary sector money lending community within the bilateral gilt repo market (inventory information as of December 2023)
What do haircuts seem like?
Trying by totally different collateral sorts within the bilateral repo market, haircuts sometimes improve with the market threat (rate of interest and liquidity) of the underlying collateral (Chart 2). Authorities debt securities – broadly recognised because the ‘most secure’ non-cash property – have a mean haircut of near zero in bilateral transactions between vendor banks and NBFIs. According to Julliard et al (2022), we discover that inside the authorities bond repo market, haircuts mirror, partly, the danger of fluctuations within the collateral worth (interest-rate threat). Longer-dated collateralised bonds typically contain larger haircuts largely as a result of being extra delicate to rate of interest modifications. In the meantime, repo backed by riskier debt securities – resembling debt issued by banks and NBFIs – attracts common haircuts of over 5%, however this stays far smaller than the 35% common haircuts on most important index fairness repos.
Chart 2: Quantity-weighted common bilateral repo haircuts by collateral sort (information from 15 June to 1 July 2023)
Inspecting the federal government bond repo market in additional element, SFTR information present that gilt repo haircuts are typically near-zero (between 0%–2%). In the meantime, haircuts on repo transactions backed by US Treasury securities are at or beneath 0.5% for many of our pattern, with a notable improve (to almost 1.5%) across the time of the Spring 2023 banking sector turmoil (Chart 3). This slight variation in haircut ranges throughout authorities bond repo supplies some additional proof that the extent of haircuts additionally displays the diploma of market liquidity within the underlying collateral securities.
Chart 3: Quantity-weighted common bilateral haircuts on authorities bond repos
Close to-zero bilateral haircuts in gilt repo are partly pushed by market construction and aggressive dynamics, past prudent threat administration concerns, as highlighted by the PRA’s 2023 thematic evaluation of main banks’ fastened revenue financing. Zero haircuts may correspond to a set of transactions (typically known as ‘nettable packages’) whereby a vendor has a virtually an identical amount of money acquired/payable with the identical shopper over the identical tenor, which could be netted out (Hempel et al (2023)).
However not all bilateral gilt repo is transacted with zero haircut. In actual fact, lower than half of bilateral repo quantity (round 40%) is so. There’s excessive heterogeneity past trades with near-zero haircut pricing, which is essentially pushed by counterparty traits, resembling credit score threat concerns (Gorton and Metrick (2012); Copeland et al (2014); Krishnamurthy et al (2014); Mancini et al (2016); and Boissel et al (2017)).
SFTR information corroborates earlier proof displaying that haircuts have a tendency to extend with counterparty credit score threat. We see this by evaluating haircut ranges throughout totally different NBFI individuals within the gilt repo market each in regular occasions and in harassed monetary market circumstances. Specializing in the LDI disaster as a case research, Chart 4 reveals that haircuts charged on LDI funds and PFs elevated procyclically throughout this stress episode and remained elevated for a while, largely reflecting larger credit score threat. This procyclicality amplified market dysfunction by elevating the price of repo borrowing for NBFIs (see Pinter (2023)). For recognized HFs in SFTR information, nevertheless, haircuts on repo gilt transactions have remained unchanged over time, and near near-zero ranges.
Chart 4: twenty fifth–seventy fifth percentile distribution of haircuts on bilateral gilt repo and reverse repo transactions throughout counterparty sectors
What implications can we draw from the evaluation?
On this publish we use novel SFTR information to indicate that variation in haircuts is essentially pushed by counterparty credit score threat concerns, though different components play a component, together with the traits of the underlying collateral securities. So, nobody haircut matches all.
We discover proof of procyclical haircut fluctuations within the LDI and PF sectors through the 2022 LDI disaster. These had been gradual to return to pre-crisis ranges on the again of heightened credit score threat. Additional work utilizing SFTR information is required to analyse the resilience of sterling markets, given the potential of haircut procyclicality to exacerbate liquidity calls for throughout stress and amplify market dysfunction.
Alternatively, the low stage of haircuts confronted by HFs might recommend that substantial leveraging could possibly be going down in a big bilateral gilt repo market phase with out applicable threat mitigation. This deserves steady monitoring given its potential monetary stability implications.
Carlos Cañon Salazar and Joshua Lillis work within the Financial institution’s Market Intelligence and Evaluation Division and Miruna-Daniela Ivan and Eduardo Maqui work within the Financial institution’s Market-Primarily based Finance Division.
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