The 1960s and 1970s witnessed rapid growth in the markets for new money market instruments, such as negotiable certificates of deposit (CDs) and Eurodollar deposits, as banks and investors sought ways around various regulations affecting funding markets. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of the deregulation and integration of the money markets. We find that the pricing and volume of negotiable CDs and Eurodollars issued were influenced by the availability of other short-term safe assets, especially Treasury bills. Banks appear to have issued these money market instruments as substitutes for other types of funding. The integration of money markets and ability of banks to raise funds using a greater variety of substitutable instruments has implications for monetary policy. We find that, when deregulation reduced money market segmentation, larger open market operations were required to produce a given change in the federal funds rate, but that the pass through of changes in the funds rate to other market rates was also greater.

Liquidity shocks transmitted through interbank connections contributed to bank distress during the Great Depression. New data on interbank connections reveal that banks were vulnerable to closures of their correspondents and their respondents. Further, banks were less responsive to network liquidity risk in their management of cash and capital buffers after the Federal Reserve was established, suggesting that banks expected the Fed to reduce that risk. The Fed's presence weakened incentives for the most systemically important banks to maintain capital and cash buffers against liquidity risk, and thereby likely contributed to the banking system's vulnerability to contagion during the Depression.

In 1936–37, the Federal Reserve doubled member banks’ reserve requirements. Friedman and Schwartz (1963) famously argued that the doubling increased reserve demand and forced the money supply to contract, which they argued caused the recession of 1937–38. Using a new database on individual banks, we find that higher reserve requirements did not generally increase banks’ reserve demand or contract lending because reserve requirements were not binding for most banks. Aggregate effects on credit supply from reserve requirement increases were therefore economically small and statistically zero.