Staff Working Paper No. 1,073
By Laura Alfaro, Saleem Bahaj, Robert Czech, Jonathon Hazell and Ioana Neamțu
We introduce a framework to understand and quantify a form of liquidity risk that we dub Liquidity After Solvency Hedging or ‘LASH’ risk. Financial institutions take LASH risk when they hedge against losses, using strategies that lead to liquidity needs when the value of the hedge falls, even as solvency improves. We focus on LASH risk relating to interest rate movements. Our framework implies that institutions with longer duration liabilities than assets – eg pension funds and insurers – take more LASH risk as interest rates fall, because solvency concerns rise in a low rate environment. Using UK regulatory data from 2019–22 on the universe of sterling repo and swap transactions, we measure, in real time and at the institution level, LASH risk for the non‑bank sector. We find that at peak LASH risk, a 100 basis points increase in interest rates would have led to liquidity needs close to the cash holdings of the pension fund and insurance sector. Using a cross‑sectional identification strategy, we find that low interest rates caused increases in LASH risk. We then find that the pre‑crisis LASH risk of non‑banks predicts their bond sales during the September 2022 LDI crisis, contributing to the yield spike in the bond market.
LASH risk and interest rates