On the availability of dollar funding

General collateral rates are known to get volatile as banks scramble for liquidity ahead of the quarter’s close.

But this March 31, GC rates didn’t just get volatile. They went positively paraobolic.

According to Bloomberg Data, the overnight US dollar GC rate more than doubled to 0.45 per cent, a rate not seen in the markets since October 2012. They fell back to 0.2 per cent range on Wednesday, implying there’s no systemic threat to talk about, but the spike does prompt questions over how and why a funding mismatch of this level might have come about.