Whenever possible, policymakers should explore a broad set of options before responding to challenges they face. However, when the President and his advisers recently discussed foreign currency intervention, we hope everyone quickly concluded that it would be a profoundly bad idea.
Before we get started, it is important to explain what foreign currency intervention is and how it is done….
Read MorePrior to the Lehman failure in 2008, the Federal Reserve controlled the federal funds rate through open market operations that added to or subtracted from the excess reserves that banks held at the Fed. Because excess reserves typically were only a few billion dollars, the funds rate was very sensitive to small changes in the quantity of reserves in the system.
The Fed’s response to Lehman and its aftermath included large-scale asset purchases that led to a thousand-fold increase in excess reserves. Consequently, since 2008, small open-market operations of a few billion dollars no longer alter the federal funds rate. Instead, the Fed introduced administered rates to change its policy stance. The most important of these—the interest rate that the Fed now pays on excess reserves (IOER)—sets a floor below which banks will not lend to other counterparties (since an overnight loan to the Fed is the safest rate available).
Until very recently, the Fed’s ability to control the federal funds rate seemed well in hand….
Read MoreSince retiring from the Federal Reserve in mid-2016, our friend Jamie McAndrews has been very busy. Unlike most of us, he is putting his ideas into action: in 2015, he and a number of his colleagues, proposed the creation of segregated balance accounts (SBAs). As they write, “SBAs are accounts that a bank or depository institution (DI) could establish at its Federal Reserve Bank using funds borrowed from a lender.” Their proposal is that a bank would offer a special account that it is fully collateralized by a deposit at the Federal Reserve. Furthermore, the SBA deposits would be remunerated at the interest rate the Fed pays on excess reserves (the IOER), minus a small fee for the bank.
We have no expertise whatsoever in determining whether the Fed has legal grounds for denying TNB a Master Account—the subject of the court case in the opening quote. But we do have concerns about SBAs and narrow banks: we worry that they would shrink the supply of credit to the private sector and aggravate financial instability during periods of banking stress. Compared to what may be large costs, we suspect that the benefits would be small….
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