Financial institutions have approached AI with cautious optimism, developing and implementing AI-based applications for things like customer service chatbots, detecting fraud, and evaluating creditworthiness. Bank supervisors are learning how to adapt.

With negotiations still underway, some unconventional ideas are being suggested in case a U.S. spending deal can't be made. Today, we'll look at one such suggestion: minting a high-dollar platinum coin.

Surekha Carpenter discusses why adequate access to credit is important for individuals and the economy overall, what contributes to gaps in access, and how community development financial institutions have addressed those gaps. Carpenter is a research analyst on the Regional and Community Analysis team at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.

Gadi Barlevy discusses recent research on the potential tension between the Fed's roles in maintaining low, stable prices and providing liquidity when financial markets are in trouble. Barlevy is a senior economist and economic advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He was interviewed on Feb. 8, 2023, before the spate of bank failures that occurred in March 2023.

FTX and its affiliated arms seemed to create a risky situation that ultimately fell apart.

The Treasury bond market suffered a liquidity crisis at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. What reforms are needed to make sure it doesn't happen again?

Ethan Bullard tells the story of Maggie L. Walker, focusing on her legacy as a bank executive, entrepreneur and activist who worked against systemic discrimination against women and blacks. Bullard is curator at the Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site in Richmond, Va.

Some believe declines in physical-asset prices prior to recessions make the recessions worse, but recent literature challenges the strength of that connection.

We construct a novel signal of bank expectations utilizing confidential data and a regulatory constraint imposed on bank internal capital markets during the 2008 crisis that made internal equity injections to commercial bank subsidiaries difficult to reverse.

Results from a recent national Fed survey show that community development financial institutions (CDFIs) and the communities they serve are facing less severe disruptions than last year. Still, staffing and other challenges are preventing CDFIs from fully meeting growing demand for their products and services.

Maggie Lena Walker built the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank to last. When it opened its doors in Richmond's Jackson Ward district in 1903, Walker became the first Black woman to establish a bank in the United States.

Properly regulating stablecoins could achieve the same objectives as issuing a central bank digital currency.

Perhaps history can be a guide on whether central banks should issue digital currencies.

Even exploring a CBDC without ultimately issuing one can provide significant benefits.

Our paper studies the role of the collateral channel for bank credit using confidential bank-firm-loan data.

This essay discusses the ideas and contributions in Marvin Goodfriend and Robert G. King's 1988 paper and relates it to some of Goodfriend's other research on banking and monetary policy.

Vanity McDaniel and Zhu Wang review the Federal Reserve's important role in the payments system, from cash and check processing to supporting innovations in electronic payments. McDaniel is a senior payments business analyst in the Payments Outreach group and Wang is vice president for research in financial and payments systems in the Research Department at the Richmond Fed.

How the Standing Repo Facility interacts with resolution planning at large banking corporations will depend in part on guidance provided by regulators.

After regulations were implemented, dealer capital commitment, trade frequency and size decreased, while dealer bid-ask spread increased.

Is money essential? How do self-interested parties bargain to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes? These were among questions addressed at a recent research conference.

Do payday loan regulations help or harm consumer welfare? How many firms close due to financial market inefficiencies? These were among questions addressed at a recent research workshop.

The Fed's relatively new repo facilities may create greater price certainty, but the Fed's intervention may mute valuable market signals regarding economic efficiency and stability.

Facebook and Amazon are examining creating digital currencies, like Alibaba has. What drives platforms to develop these currencies, and should central banks be worried?

The policies were gradually phased out in many advanced and emerging economies. Will they come back?

Newly available data show that larger and less liquid banks use the discount window more actively and that holdings of bank reserves are negatively correlated with discount window borrowing. Access to the discount window affects bank portfolio decisions, in particular holdings of reserves, in subtle ways.

We study new transaction-level data of discount window borrowing in the U.S. from 2010–17, merged with quarterly data on bank financial conditions (balance sheet and revenue).

Recently, the Dodd-Frank Act has arguably played an important role during the coronavirus crisis. It's a good time to take another look.

In Taming the Megabanks, Arthur Wilmarth Jr. of George Washington University Law School explores the implications of the gradual erosion and ultimate repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act's banking restrictions.

Economists at the Richmond Fed analyze the role of dealer-provided liquidity in sovereign credit default swap markets.

We construct and calibrate a monetary model of corporate finance with endogenous formation of lending relationships. The equilibrium features money demands by firms that depend on their access to credit and a pecking order of financing means.

The Federal Reserve developed and fielded a survey of community-based organizations to better understand the impacts of COVID-19 on their operations and the communities they serve. Fifth District respondents in April and June expressed that while organizations and communities are experiencing significant disruptions, effects are expected to be longer-lasting for the latter.

The market for repurchase agreements has repeatedly adapted to changing circumstances.

Recent Richmond Fed research has shed new light on the functioning of the discount window and the role that stigma may play in achieving desirable outcomes.

The technology behind cryptocurrencies shows promise for raising capital but has also drawn scrutiny from regulators.

Prior to the advent of modern home mortgage markets in the United States, markets in which mortgage-backed securities and government-sponsored enterprises now play significant roles, prospective homebuyers had to rely on other mechanisms of home finance.

The choice between bankruptcy or bailout trades off different sets of costs on the economy. This Economic Brief presents a new tool that could assist policymakers with this evaluation, potentially helping to curb the "too big to fail" problem, serving as a useful complement to the "living wills" process, and making the resolution process more transparent.

This Economic Brief reviews the intuition and theory behind bank runs and the most popular proposed solutions.

A tax exemption has helped credit unions since the 1930s, but some argue they should be treated more like banks

Central banks play strong roles in domestic financial stability policy, but the full scopes of their financial stability mandates are ambiguous.

There are 12 Federal Reserve Banks across the country: How did one land in Richmond, Virginia?

As a way to understand the origins of this expectation, in this Economic Brief we look at the relationship between the federal funds rate and the average net interest margin for U.S. banks since the mid-1980s. We find that the relationship is not as clear-cut as one might suspect.

The rate of new-bank formation has fallen from an average of about 100 per year since 1990 to an average of about three per year since 2010. If this change persists, it will have a large impact on the composition of the banking sector as well as the flow of credit in the economy.

The most recent study published by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies estimates that Islam was the fastest-growing religion in the United States between 2000 and 2010. Yet there are relatively few financial products available here for those followers who require their financial contracts to comply with Islamic laws and moral codes, called Sharia law.

Richmond Fed president Jeffrey M. Lacker spoke about the use of the Bankruptcy Code to resolve large complex financial institutions.