By announcing that it is willing to throw up to $1.5 trillion in electronically created money in order to give three-month loans to those institutions that bought Treasury debt earlier, the Fed is bailing out not only the holders of Treasury debt, but also the Treasury itself.
The Federal Reserve's monumental mistake of cutting rates this past week can only be understood in the context of the rising God complex of central planners: an overwhelming combination of ignorance and arrogance.
Today's rate cut of 50 basis points is the largest rate cut since December 2008, in the midst of the aftermath of the financial crisis. But Chairman Powell insists the US economy is "strong."
By being so dovish for so long, the Fed has greatly limited what it can do in case of recession without resorting to untried and radical solutions like negative rates.
During January 2020, year-over-year (YOY) growth in the money supply was at 6.32 percent. That's up from December's rate of 5.53 percent, and up from January 2019's rate of 3.38 percent.
In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world adopted new “tools” to influence economic activity in addition to its standard open market operations.
Robert Murphy defines some of the conventional “monetary aggregates,” such as M1 and M2, and gives the textbook rundown of how the Federal Reserve and commercial banking system “create money” when the Fed buys assets and the commercial banks extend new loans.
These days, the commercial banking system isn’t where the action is. Instead, it’s the shadow banking system that needs direct feeding to goose inflation—at least inflation in asset prices, and also to keep the debt service on the nation’s debt as low as possible.
The Fed's balance sheet has risen to $4.1 trillion from $3.7 trillion in August. Nomi Prins discusses what this policy shift means and what it portends for 2020.
Why do we have money in the first place? Where does it come from, and what determines its form? What qualities make for a good money? What role do banks play—is it something other than what money itself does for us?
