Reserves and Where to Find Them

Banks use central bank reserves for a multitude of purposes including making payments, managing intraday liquidity outflows, and meeting regulatory and internal liquidity requirements. Data on aggregate reserves for the U.S. banking system are readily accessible , but information on the holdings of individual banks is confidential. This makes it difficult to investigate important questions like: “Which types of banks hold reserves?” “How concentrated are they?” and “Does the distribution change over time or in response to significant events?” In this post, we summarize how non-confidential data can be used to answer these questions by providing publicly available proxies for bank-level reserves.