![]() For the purposes of understanding monetary policy, it is sufficient to think of the Fed’s assets as Treasury securities and its liabilities as currency and reserve balances – the deposits of depository institutions (henceforth “banks”) at a Federal Reserve Bank, as depicted in Figure 1. The Fed, like all central banks, implements monetary policy by adjusting its policy rates and the size and composition of its balance sheet. To do that, it needs to do four things: 1) make reserve balances relatively expensive by gradually but steadily reducing the amount it is supplying so that market rates rise above the interest rate the Fed pays on deposits 2) adjust the supply of reserves in response to shocks to supply and demand as the supply trends down 3) eliminate regulatory and examination biases toward reserve balances and away from Treasury securities as a source of liquidity 4) keep the new standing repo facility stigma-free by allowing banks to consider rather than ignore its existence for liquidity regulation purposes. To return to that previous system, the Fed needs to wean the financial system off of so much Fed-supplied liquidity. By contrast, the Fed’s previous operating system allowed it excellent control of interest rates with a light touch on the financial system. Thus far the 2019 approach is failing in its purported benefit of allowing the Fed to take a passive approach to monetary policy implementation, is transforming the Fed’s role in society and is costing taxpayers money. It’s time that Congress provided oversight of the Fed’s decision on its new method to conduct monetary policy and prompted a public debate about its merits. That is, the Treasury, and thus taxpayers, are forced to pay more to borrow when the borrowing is done by the Fed than by the Treasury. Because the Fed has become so huge, it must pay up to borrow – the interest rate the Fed pays on bank deposits is above the interest rate on Treasury bills. The Fed is, in effect, converting Treasury securities into Fed liabilities. The Fed’s operating regime also increases the Treasury Department’s borrowing cost. Thus, the policy automatically results in the Fed’s continued growth and ever-widening entanglement with the financial system. To avoid that premium, the Fed has been forced to expand its counterparties beyond banks. Because the supply must keep growing, the interest rate the Fed pays to get banks to hold the reserve balances must rise relative to market rates. As a result, the amount that the Fed needs to supply to maintain the buffer also grows over time. As argued below, over time, banks adjust to whatever amount of reserves the Fed supplies, and any sharp drop in that level is disruptive. Moreover, the Fed has committed to providing so much extra liquidity that it would not need to adjust the quantity of reserve balances it is supplying in response to transitory shocks to liquidity supply and demand.įed officials argued in 2019 that providing a buffer above the structural demand for reserve balances would make it unnecessary for the Fed to engage in fine-tuning operations they did not anticipate that the implementation framework would be inherently unstable. Now the rate is determined by transactions between banks and the Fed. Previously, the Fed had kept reserve balances (bank deposits at the Fed) just scarce enough that the overnight interest rate was determined by transactions between financial institutions those transactions consisted of banks with extra liquidity lending to those that needed it. Specifically, the Fed announced that it would conduct monetary policy by over-supplying liquidity to the financial system, driving short-term interest rates down to the rate that the Fed pays to sop the liquidity back up. The record indicates that the FOMC did not appreciate the consequences of its decision at the time, and the question now is whether the decision will be revisited given how manifest and serious those consequences are. To implement policy in its new regime, the Fed not only has to be much bigger but also must continuously grow larger and expand the breadth of its counterparties. Nevertheless, the change has had and will continue to have a profound effect on the role of the Federal Reserve in the United States financial system. ![]() ![]() ![]() The change was adopted without any formal notice or request for public comment, nor with any formal input from Congress or the Administration. 30, 2019, the Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve System announced to little fanfare a momentous change in how it conducts monetary policy.
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