First was the so-called flash rally of October 2014; then, the repo market distress in September 2019; and third, the extraordinary dislocations at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020. General George Patton once said, “Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and unpredictable.” It’s a good piece of advice—and one that 1/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  should guide our work on Treasury market reform. The IAWG report I mentioned earlier reviews these events, so I won’t repeat them here. However, two lessons are clear. First, the unforeseeable and unpredictable will happen, and can result in significant stresses in the Treasury and related markets that may spread to broader financial conditions. Second, when disruptions have been sufficiently severe and persistent, the market has not been able to quickly self-correct without official-sector intervention. The severe disruptions to the Treasury and funding markets in March of last year illustrate these points. The incipient breakdown in market functioning quickly spread to other segments of the U.S. and global financial markets, risking a broad-based pullback in the availability of credit that is essential for our economy. The speed and extent of the market disruption necessitated immediate and dramatic action, the scale of which was truly unprecedented. At the New York Fed, we are used to talking in very large sums, but even for us, the figures were staggering.
(1999), “  Do efficient financial markets mitigate financial crises?”, speech before the 1999 Financial Markets Conference of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Sea Island, Georgia, 19 October. [4] The net asset value spread refers to the difference between the price at which exchange-traded fund shares trade and the net asset value of the underlying portfolio held by the fund per share. This may also suggest that exchange-traded fund prices provided more upto-date information, thereby supporting price discovery. See Financial Stability Board (2020),  Holistic Review of the March Market Turmoil, 17 November. [5] Duffie, D. (2020), “  Still the World’s Safe Haven? Redesigning the U.S. Treasury Market after the COVID-19 Crisis”, Hutchins Center Working Papers, No 62, June. [6] It is even conceivable that the market turmoil could have been worse without the more stringent regulatory requirements on dealers, which helped to ensure their resilience during the spring. [7] At the same time, higher cash holdings were associated with substantially weaker performance in 2018-19 compared with previous years, potentially reflecting the high costs of holding cash in a low interest rate environment. [8] Schrimpf, A. et al. (2020), “  Leverage and margin spirals in fixed income markets during the Covid-19 crisis”, BIS Bulletin, No 2, Bank for International Settlements, 2 April. [9] Vivar, L.M. et al. (2020), “  Burned by leverage? Flows and fragility in bond mutual funds”, Working Paper Series, No 2413, ECB, May. [10] Vassallo, D. et al.