Authors: Thomas M. Eisenbach and Gregory Phelan
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Staff Reports
Fragility of Safe Asset Markets
Number 1026
July 2022 Revised October 2024
July 2022 Revised October 2024
JEL classification: C7, G01, G1, E4, E5, G2
In March 2020, safe asset markets experienced surprising and unprecedented price crashes. We explain how strategic investor behavior can create such market fragility in a model with investors valuing safety, investors valuing liquidity, and constrained dealers. While safety investors and liquidity investors can interact symbiotically with offsetting trades in times of stress, liquidity investors’ strategic interaction harbors the potential for self-fulfilling fragility. When the market is fragile, standard flight-to-safety can have a destabilizing effect and trigger a “dash-for-cash” by liquidity investors. Well-designed policy interventions can reduce market fragility ex ante and restore orderly functioning ex post.
Author Disclosure Statement(s)
Thomas M. Eisenbach and Gregory Phelan
The authors declare that they have no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper.
The authors declare that they have no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper.
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