The Impact of Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) Advances on Small Business Lending by Community Banks—2010–2016

In this paper, we examine the relationship between small business loan growth and growth in core deposits and Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBs) advances from 2010 to 2016. Controlling for other effects, we find that the relationships between small business loan growth is positively and significantly related to both FHLB advance growth and core deposit growth, with the coefficient on advance growth being significantly larger than the coefficient on core deposits over the entire sample period. We also tested whether this relationship changed after 2014:3 reflecting the Federal Reserve’s relaxation of the regulatory burden on smaller banks. We find that the relationship between loan growth and core deposit growth became more positive after the change, but the relationship between loan growth and FHLB advance growth did not. As a result, we could no longer reject the hypothesis that the coefficient on core deposit growth was equal to the coefficient on FHLB advance growth after 2014:3. This provides some empirical support that the regulatory changes in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (DFA) influenced small business lending by strengthening the impact of the growth in core deposits on the growth of small business lending, complementing the work of Bordo and Duca (2018) that changes in DFA had some unintended negative consequences for lending to small businesses. It also suggests that lowering the regulatory burden faced by community banks (which have a larger proportion of core deposits to total assets than non-community banks) could improve the incentive to increase small business lending. It also implies that FHLB advances remain an important funding tool at the margin to give commercial banking organizations greater liquidity and flexibility in funding their balance sheets.

Private Supply of Safe Assets: Shadow Banks Versus Traditional Banks

We show that the creation of private safe assets by shadow banks can decrease traditional banks' supply of safe assets. The 2014-2016 money fund reform created a large demand shock for safe assets, to which Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBs) responded, expanding their balance sheets and increasing their issuance of short-term debt. To reduce the resulting interest rate risk, FHLBs shortened the repricing of their loans to banks. Focusing on small banks for which the reform was exogenous, we use a novel instrumental variable strategy to show that shadow banks create safe assets at the expense of banks' deposits.

The Federal Funds Market since the Financial Crisis

Before the financial crisis, the federal funds market was a market in which domestic commercial banks with excess reserves would lend funds overnight to other commercial banks with temporary shortfalls in liquidity. What has happened to this market since the financial crisis? Though the banking system has been awash in reserves and the federal funds rate has been near zero, the market has continued to operate, but it has changed. Different institutions now participate. Government-sponsored enterprises such as the Federal Home Loan Banks loan funds, and foreign commercial banks borrow.

Bank Deregulation And The Portfolios Of Savings And Loan Associations

Carron (1982) has described the precarious condition of the thrift industry, which has been a subject of concern for over a decade. Unlike commercial banks, S&Ls have not been able to insulate themselves from interest rate risk, nor have they significantly altered the composition of their balance sheets. In contrast to the rapid growth of the industry up until the 1960s, the industry growth weakened by the turn of the decade. Abrupt swings in savings deposits became synchronized with the cyclical behavior of the national economy. Marked fluctuations in industry funds over time forced S&Ls to draw heavily upon non-deposit sources, particularly borrowings from the Federal Home Loan Banks, and other expensive deposits.