Confidential federal funds transaction data (restricted access)

Confidential supervisory data: not exercised here

Confidential federal funds transaction data is restricted and held by the Federal Reserve. It is not for sale and not publicly downloadable: it carries no provenance badge because there is no access path we can run here. The effective federal funds rate and other published benchmarks are public, but the underlying transaction-level borrowing and lending records are confidential. Researchers reach them only through a Federal Reserve affiliation or an approved restricted-data arrangement, inside a secure environment, with output subject to disclosure review. The page documents what the collection is and the gotchas; treat it as unverified. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

Confidential federal funds transaction data is the transaction-level record of overnight interbank borrowing and lending in the federal funds market, held by the Federal Reserve (collected largely through FR 2420 and related reporting). It lets researchers see who borrowed from whom, at what rate and amount, beyond the published effective rate. A paper we distill uses it: Kotidis & Schreft use confidential federal funds data to measure how exposed banks turn to the fed funds market for borrowing after a cyberattack disrupts their normal payment flows.

• Cost: not for sale. Restricted-access confidential supervisory data.
• Source: Federal Reserve (transaction reporting, including FR 2420).
• Coverage: federal funds transactions of reporting institutions; the reporting universe is a size-thresholded set of banks and FBOs, not every market participant.

Access (restricted)

• Benchmark rates are public; the transactions are not. The effective federal funds rate and related statistics are published; the transaction-level records are confidential.
• Through a Federal Reserve affiliation or approved program. Access is limited to researchers at the Federal Reserve System or others granted entry to the restricted data, worked inside a secure environment with output subject to disclosure review.
• See FR 2420 for the reporting form whose instructions are public even though the data cannot be pulled.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• The reporting universe is not the whole market. Only institutions above a size threshold report, so the observed transactions are a selected subset. Inferring market-wide totals requires care about coverage.
• Identifying fed funds versus look-alike trades. Fed funds, Eurodollars, and some repo are economically similar overnight transactions; classification rules determine what counts as fed funds. Use the collection’s definition, not your own.
• Borrowing and lending sides. A transaction has two reporters with possibly different reporting obligations; double-counting or one-sided coverage can bias volumes. Confirm which side is observed.
• Post-crisis structural change. The fed funds market changed markedly after 2008 (large reserves, FHLB lending, IOER); volumes and participants are not comparable across that break. Do not pool pre- and post-crisis naively.
• Mapping to bank identifiers. Reporters must be linked to RSSD IDs and other bank data; mergers break the link over time. Verify the crosswalk.
• Output is disclosure-reviewed and cannot be redistributed. Transaction-level results leave the secure environment only after review, and the micro-data itself cannot be shared.

Citation

Cite the source, e.g.: Confidential federal funds transaction data (Federal Reserve), accessed under restricted-data arrangement, YYYY-MM-DD. For the public series, cite the effective federal funds rate. State the reporting basis (for example FR 2420), the sample window, and the reporting population.