Excerpt
The Federal Reserve’s Balance Sheet as a Financial-Stability Tool. Robin Greenwood, Samuel Hanson, Jeremy Stein, September 2016, Paper, "In this paper, we argue that the Federal Reserve should use its balance sheet to help reduce a key threat to financial stability: the tendency for private-sector financial intermediaries to engage in excessive amounts of maturity transformation—i.e. to finance risky assets using dangerously large volumes of runnable short-term liabilities. Specifically, we make the case that the Fed can complement its regulatory efforts on the financial-stability front by maintaining a relatively large balance sheet, even when policy rates have moved well away from the zero lower bound (ZLB). In so doing, it can help ensure that there is an ample supply of government-provided safe shortterm claims—e.g. interest-bearing reserves and reverse repurchase agreements."