I examine the relation between Federal Reserve emergency actions and aggregate U.S. systemic risk during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 crisis. I divide these actions in to three categories: lender of last resort (LLR), liquidity provision, and open market operations (OMO). Evidence suggests that during the GFC, liquidity provision and OMO was related*⁎Associate Professor, Department of Finance and Real Estate, Villanova School of Business. E-mail: [email protected]. I am grateful for helpful comments from Allen Berger, Lamont Black, Jennifer Dlugosz, Mike Pagano, and Alvaro Taboada and for comments from participants at the 2019 Southern Financial Association Annual Meetings.Charlotte Bern and Jonathan Wadowski provided excellent research assistance. All errors are my own. to reduced systemic risk, while evidence on LLR actions is mixed. Further, I find that Federal Reserve actions were related to increased stability in other G8 financial systems during the GFC, and that after the GFC, facilities that remained operational were no longer related to aggregate systemic risk. I do not find a relation between Federal Reserve actions and systemic risk during the COVID-19 crisis. Together, these findings can inform actions and policy decisions in future financial crises.

While operational risk is generally perceived as idiosyncratic with limited systemic implications, we document that operational risk threatens financial stability. Using supervisory data on large U.S. Bank Holding Companies (BHCs), we find operational losses increase systemic risk through a direct channel that impairs market values of loss-experiencing BHCs as well as a channel of correlated losses that impact multiple institutions simultaneously. Findings are driven by tail events, more pronounced for systemically important and closer-to-distress BHCs, and vary by business lines, event types, and financial/economic environments. Our results extend the operational and systemic risk literatures and have key policy implications.

Bank prudential supervision is designed to enhance financial stability, but we are unaware of extant empirical research linking this supervision to financial system risk. In particular, there are no prior findings on how supervision enforcement actions (EAs) – major tools of supervisors – affect systemic risk. We empirically investigate relations between EAs and banks’ contributions to systemic risk. We find significantly smaller bank contributions to systemic risk after EAs than before them, suggesting that EAs are associated with enhanced financial stability. The data also suggest that the primary channel behind this relation is reduced leverage, but lower portfolio risk also plays a role. We also find that the magnitude of our findings is greater during financial crises than normal times, and that more severe EAs and EAs against banks are more effective in systemic risk reduction than that are those less severe and those against individual bank managers, respectively.