Mehrling Interviewed in Bloomberg on Repo Market
Perry Mehrling, Professor of International Political Economy at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was interviewed for a recent article examining the recent trouble the overnight repurchase agreement, or “repo,” market, has experienced.
Mehrling was quoted in a December 20, 2019 article in Bloomberg entitled “Repo Oracle Zoltan Pozsar Expects Even More Turmoil.”
From the text of the article:
In finance, a lack of liquidity “kills you quick,” says Perry Mehrling, a Boston University economics professor who co-authored a 2013 paper with Pozsar. “How do you not get killed by liquidity? By rolling it over. By saying, ‘I can’t make the payment today. I’ll make it tomorrow.’ That’s basically what overnight repo does.”
Pozsar’s warnings get attention on Wall Street because he has a big-picture view of this complex market and can explain it well—at least to those fluent in the language of repoland. “I think he has every short-term interest-rate trader in the world on his speed dial,” Mehrling says. “He’s like a spider in the middle of the web, where he can gather this information and then try to make sense of it.
Perry Mehrling is a Professor of International Political Economy at the Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University, where he teaches courses on the economics of money and banking, the history of money and finance, and international money, the first of these is available online. Perry is the author of The New Lombard Street: How the Fed became the dealer of last resort (Princeton 2011), Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance (Wiley 2005), and The Money Interest and the Public Interest (Harvard 1997). Recent papers and video are available on his website, “one stop shopping for all things ‘money view’”.