The Treasury Market Practices Group (TMPG), a New York Fed-sponsored group of market professionals, recently released a white paper and proposed recommendations on margin practices for repurchase agreements, or repos, involving U.S. Treasury securities. The white paper, based on discussions with market participants and data from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research, describes the current risk management practices in the Treasury repo market for mitigating counterparty risk exposures, or the potential losses from a counterparty defaulting before final settlement of a financial transaction. It also identifies the resulting risk and resiliency issues. Based on this work, the proposed updates to the TMPG’s Best Practices include a recommendation that all Treasury repo trades should include prudent haircuts, or margin, on the value of the securities, in concert with other risk management techniques. In this article, we highlight the main findings of the white paper that led to this proposed best practice recommendation, with a focus on the non-centrally cleared bilateral repo market.
