Panel at the Bank of Canada/Riksbank Conference on the Economics of CBDC, November 16, 2023. Video.
Fed Governor Christopher Waller, UCSB professor Rod Garratt and myself assess the case for central bank digital currency and stable coins and respond to excellent questions from the audience.
On the question whether the Fed should seriously consider retail CBDC, the FT sides with the pro camp.
While elsewhere such central bank digital currencies can appear “a solution in search of a problem”, America’s lacklustre retail banking system and the importance of the dollar in cross-border money flows make an obvious case for reform.
Compare the contributions by Darrell Duffie and Chris Waller in the CEPR eBook.
CEPR eBook, November 24, 2021. HTML.
VoxEU, November 24, 2021. HTML.
Retail central bank digital currency has morphed from an obscure fascination of technophiles and monetary theorists into a major preoccupation of central bankers. Pilot projects abound and research on the topic has exploded as private sector initiatives such as Libra/Diem have focused policymakers’ minds and taken the status quo option off the table. In this eBook, academics and policymakers review what we know about the economic, legal, and political implications of CBDC, discuss current projects, and look ahead.
For over a year the federal funds rate has increased relative to the rate the Fed pays on excess reserves. In mid September 2019, the federal funds rate increased abruptly, triggering the Fed to inject fresh funds. In parallel, the repo market rates spiked dramatically.
On the Cato Institute’s blog, George Selgin argues that structurally elevated demand collided with reduced supply. He mentions explicit and implicit regulation; Treasury General Account (TGA) balances; the NY Fed’s foreign repo pool (Japanese banks); and the administration’s $1 trillion deficit which required primary dealers to underwrite newly-issued government debt.
The bottom line is that regulators have managed to raise the biggest banks liquidity needs enough to compel them to sit on most of the banking system’s seemingly huge stock of excess reserves, and to do so even as repo markets present them with an opportunities to earn five times what those reserves are yielding just by lending them out overnight.
… So there you have it: a host of developments adding to banks’ demand for excess reserves, while others gradually chipped away at the stock of such reserves. Add a spike in primary dealers’ demand for short-term funding, a coinciding round of tax payments that transferred as many reserves to the TGA, and binding intraday liquidity requirements at the banks holding a large share of total system excess reserves, and you have the makings of last month’s perfect repo-market storm.
David Andolfatto and Jane Ihrig concur. On the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’ On the Economy Blog, they already argued in March 2019 that banks feel compelled to hoard reserves rather than lending against treasuries:
Why should banks prefer reserves to higher-yielding Treasuries? One explanation is that Treasuries are not really cash equivalent if funds are needed immediately. In particular, for resolution planning purposes, banks may worry about the market value they would receive in the sale of or agreement to repurchase their securities in an individual stress scenario.
Consistent with this possibility, Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Randal Quarles noted, “Occasionally we hear that banks feel they are under supervisory pressure to satisfy their [high-quality liquid assets] with reserves rather than Treasury securities.”
To quantify this liquidity consideration, a recent post on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Liberty Street Economics blog suggests that the eight domestic Large Institution Supervision Coordinating Committee’s banks collectively may want to hold $784 billion in precautionary reserves to cover their immediate liquidity needs in times of stress.
Andolfatto and Ihrig argue that the precautionary reserves hoarding by banks could substantially be reduced if the Fed offered a standing repo facility:
The Fed could easily incentivize banks to reduce their demand for reserves by operating a standing overnight repurchase (repo) facility that would permit banks to convert Treasuries to reserves on demand at an administered rate. This administered rate could be set a bit above market rates—perhaps several basis points above the top of the federal funds target range—so that the facility is not used every day …
With this facility in place, banks should feel comfortable holding Treasuries to help accommodate stress scenarios instead of reserves. The demand for reserves would decline substantially as a result. Ample reserves—and therefore the size of the Fed’s balance sheet—could in fact be much closer to their historical levels.
A standing repo facility could effectively impose a ceiling on repo rates. And as Andolfatto and Ihrig argue it would also have other benefits. In a follow up post, Andolfatto and Ihrig emphasize that,
[w]hile U.S. Treasuries are given equal weight with reserves in the calculation of high-quality liquid assets (HQLA) for the LCR, they are evidently not considered equivalent for resolution purposes.
Internal liquidity stress tests apparently assume a significant discount on Treasury securities liquidated in large volumes during times of stress, so that Treasuries are not treated as cash-equivalent. We have heard that banks occasionally feel under supervisory pressure to satisfy their HQLA requirements with reserves rather than Treasuries.
On the NewMonetarism blog, Stephen Williamson offers a longer-term perspective. He appears more skeptical as far as bank liquidity requirements as a possible explanation for the recent interest rate spikes are concerned. In Williamson’s view a floor system that requires even more reserves in the banking system than currently present is ineffective and should be replaced. He writes (my emphasis):
Before the financial crisis, the Fed intervened on the supply side of the overnight credit market by varying the quantity of its lending in the repo market so as to peg the fed funds rate. … a corridor system, as the central bank’s interest rate target was bounded above by the discount rate, and below by the interest rate on reserves, which was zero at the time. But, the Fed could have chosen to run a corridor by intervening on the other side of the market – by varying the quantity of reverse repos, for example. Post-financial crisis, the Fed’s floor system is effectively a mechanism for intervening on the demand side … With a large quantity reserves outstanding, those financial institutions holding reserves accounts have the option of lending to the Fed at the interest rate on reserves, or lending in the market – fed funds or repo market. Financial market arbitrage, in a frictionless world, would then look after the rest. By pegging the interest rate on excess reserves (IOER), the Fed should in principle peg overnight rates.
The problem is that overnight markets – particularly in the United States – are gummed up with various frictions. … Friction in U.S. overnight credit markets … is nothing new. Indeed, the big worry at the Fed, when “liftoff” from the 0-0.25% fed funds rate trading range occurred in December 2015, was that arbitrage would not work to peg overnight rates in a higher range. That’s why the Fed introduced the ON-RRP, or overnight reverse-repo, facility, with the ON-RRP rate set at the bottom of the fed funds rate target range, and IOER at the top of the range. The idea was that the ON-RRP rate would bound the fed funds rate from below.
… if total reserves outstanding are constant and general account balances go up, then reserve balances held in the private sector must go down by the same amount. The Fed permits these large and fluctuating Treasury balances, apparently because they think this won’t matter in a floor system, as it shouldn’t. … Another drain on private sector reserve balances is the foreign repo pool. … if the problem is low reserve balances in the private sector, those balances could be increased by about $300 billion if the Fed eliminated the foreign repo pool.
… The key problem is that the Fed is trying to manage overnight markets by working from the banking sector, through the stock of reserves. Apparently, that just won’t work in the American context, because market frictions are too severe. In particular, these frictions segment banks from the rest of the financial sector in various ways. The appropriate type of daily intervention for the Fed is in the repo market, which is more broadly-based. If $1.5 trillion in reserve balances isn’t enough to make a floor system work, without intervention through either a reverse-repo or repo facility, then that’s a bad floor system. … Make the secured overnight financing rate the policy rate, and run a corridor system. That’s what normal central banks do.
Some background information:
In the FT, Cale Tilford, Joe Rennison, Laura Noonan, Colby Smith, and Brendan Greeley “break down what went wrong, what happens next, and whether markets can avoid another cash crunch” (with many figures).
This post was updated on November 21, 11:09 pm; and on November 26 (FT article).
The Federal Reserve Banks will develop a round-the-clock real-time payment and settlement service, FedNow. The objective is to support faster payments in the United States.
From the FAQs (my emphasis):
… there are some faster payment services offered by banks and fintech companies in the United States, their functionality can be limited. In particular, due to the lack of a universal infrastructure to conduct faster payments, most of these services rely on “closed-loop” approaches, meaning that users signed up to one service cannot exchange payments with users signed up to other services. Other services target ubiquity by relying on users’ bank accounts, but they may face challenges reaching enough banks to allow any two users to exchange payments. Moreover, these services typically use traditional retail payment methods to move funds between accounts. These methods result in a build-up of financial obligations between banks …
… fragmented market for end-user faster payment services, with services that may provide faster payment functionality in some circumstances and for some specific uses, like person-to-person payments, but that do not have sufficient reach to advance the U.S. payment system as a whole. The Federal Reserve’s goal in announcing the planned actions is to provide a much broader scope of access to safe and efficient faster payments throughout the country.
… the European Central Bank, Banco de México, and the Reserve Bank of Australia have looked to support the development of faster payments in their jurisdictions by providing services that enable payment-by-payment, real-time settlement of retail payments at any time …
First, the Federal Reserve Banks (the Reserve Banks) will develop the FedNowSM Service, a new interbank 24x7x365 real-time gross settlement (RTGS) service with integrated clearing functionality, to directly support the provision of end-to-end faster payment services by banks (or their agents). Second, the Federal Reserve will explore the expansion of hours for the Fedwire® Funds Service and the National Settlement Service (NSS), up to 24x7x365, subject to further analysis of relevant operational, risk, and policy considerations, to support liquidity management in private-sector RTGS services for faster payments, as well as provide additional benefits to financial markets beyond faster payments.
… Board has concluded that private-sector real-time gross settlement (RTGS) services for faster payments alone cannot be expected to provide an infrastructure for faster payments with reasonable effectiveness, scope, and equity. In particular, private-sector services are likely to face significant challenges in extending equitable access to the more than 10,000 diverse banks across the country.
the service will settle obligations between banks through adjustments to balances in banks’ master accounts at the Reserve Banks; these funds will be eligible to earn interest and count toward banks’ reserve requirements. Consistent with the goal of supporting faster payments, use of the FedNow Service will require participating banks to make the funds associated with individual payments available to their end-user customers immediately after receiving notification of settlement from the service. The service will support values initially limited to $25,000
… the FedNow Service will be available to banks eligible to hold accounts at the Reserve Banks …
By expanding Fedwire Funds Service and NSS hours, the Federal Reserve would provide further support to private-sector RTGS services for faster payments based on a joint account.
Some decision makers at the Fed believed that the Fed lacks authority to regulate banks operating payment systems in order to coerce them to offer access also to smaller banks.
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is requesting comment on the proposal to lower the interest rate on excess balances of eligible institutions that hold a very large proportion of their assets in the form of reserves—i.e., on balances of ‘The Narrow Bank.’
The document states that
[t]he Board is concerned that [Pass-Through Investment Entities] PTIEs, by maintaining all or substantially all of their assets in the form of balances at Reserve Banks and having the ability to attract very large quantities of deposits at a near-IOER rate, have the potential to complicate the implementation of monetary policy.
On his blog, Stephen Williamson discusses the Fed’s plan to maintain a much larger balance sheet in the future than before the crisis. He is not convinced that this plan is a good one.
But what’s the harm in a large Fed balance sheet? The larger the balance sheet, the lower is the quantity of Treasury securities in financial markets, and the higher is reserves. Treasuries are highly liquid, widely-traded securities that play a key role in overnight repo markets. Reserves are highly liquid – for the institutions that hold them – but they are held only by a subset of financial institutions. Thus, a large Fed balance sheet could harm the operation of financial markets. … it would be reflected in a scarcity of collateral in overnight financial markets – in market interest rates. Before early 2018, T-bill rates and repo rates tended to be lower than the fed funds rate, and the fed funds rate was lower than IOER. Now, all those rates are about the same. The Fed thinks the difference is more Treasury debt, but I think the end of the Fed’s reinvestment program mattered, in that it increased the stock of on-the-run Treasuries. Whichever it was, apparently the quantity of Treasuries outstanding matters for the smooth – indeed, efficient – operation of financial markets, and the Fed should not mess with that. My prediction would be that, if we get to the end of the year and the Fed is again buying Treasuries, that we’ll see repo rates and T-bill rates dropping below IOER. Watch for that.
At an AEI event in Washington, James McAndrews discussed narrow banking and the Federal Reserve’s opposition to McAndrews’ “The Narrow Bank USA Inc.”
His slides emphasize the fact that a narrow bank can help achieve goals that Federal Reserve representatives themselves promoted in the past.
In the FAZ, Philip Plickert reports that Deutsche Bundesbank changed its terms of business. Starting August 25, the Bundesbank may refuse cash transactions with a bank if the Bundesbank fears that, counter to the bank’s assurances, the cash transaction might help the bank or its customers evade sanctions or restrictions with the aim to impede money laundering or terrorism finance.
Conveniently, this will allow the Bundesbank to reject a request by European-Iranian Handelsbank to withdraw several hundred Euros.
Die staatliche Europäisch-Iranische Handelsbank (EIHB) in Hamburg hatte Anfang Juli bei der Bundesbank beantragt, mehr als 300 Millionen Euro in bar abzuheben. Nach Informationen der F.A.Z. war sogar von 350 bis 380 Millionen Euro die Rede. Dem Vernehmen nach soll es sich um Guthaben der iranischen Zentralbank bei der EIHB handeln. … Derzeit prüft die Finanzaufsicht Bafin, ob die EIHB die Vorschriften zur Prävention von Geldwäsche und Terrorfinanzierung einhält. Diese Prüfung könne sich hinziehen, heißt es in Berlin aus dem Finanzministerium. Bis die Bafin ihr Urteil abgibt, dürften die geänderten AGB der Bundesbank greifen.
The US has pressured the German government to prevent the cash withdrawal. And the Bundesbank closely cooperates with the Federal Reserve.
In ihren geänderten Geschäftsbedingungen ist explizit die Rede davon, dass auch die „drohende Beendigung von wichtigen Beziehungen zu Zentralbanken und Finanzinstitutionen dritter Länder“ ein Ablehnungsgrund für Bargeldgeschäfte sein könne.
In July, JP Koning had blogged about the bank’s request. His conclusion was:
There are sound political and moral reasons for both censoring Iran and not censoring it. Moral or not, my guess is that most nations will breathe a sigh of relief if German authorities see it fit to let the €300 million cash withdrawal go through. It would be a sign to all of us that we don’t live in a unipolar monetary world where a single American censor can prevent entire nations from making the most basic of cross-border payments. Instead, we’d be living in a bipolar monetary world where censorship needn’t mean being completely cutoff from the global payments system.
The sooner the Bundesbank prints up and dispatches the €300 million, the better for us all.
In an earlier column, Koning had described the difficulties for financial institutions worldwide to circumvent U.S. financial sanctions.
In its July 2017 Monetary Policy Report, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System discusses monetary policy rules. On pp. 36–38, the Board argues that
[t]he small number of variables involved in policy rules makes them easy to use. However, the U.S. economy is highly complex, and these rules, by their very nature, do not capture that complexity. …
Another issue related to the implementation of rules involves the measurement of the variables that drive the prescriptions generated by the rules. For example, there are many measures of inflation, and they do not always move together or by the same amount. …
In addition, both the level of the neutral real interest rate in the longer run and the level of the unemployment rate that is sustainable in the longer run are difficult to estimate precisely, and estimates made in real time may differ substantially from estimates made later on …
Furthermore, the prescribed responsiveness of the federal funds rate to its determinants differs across policy rules. …
Finally, monetary policy rules do not take account of broader risk considerations. … asymmetric risk has, in recent years, provided a sound rationale for following a more gradual path of rate increases than that prescribed by policy rules.
In the FT, Sam Fleming and Demetri Sevastopulo report that the White House considers Marvin Goodfriend for the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors.
He has criticised the Fed’s crisis-era balance sheet expansion, saying the central bank should generally not purchase mortgage-backed securities, and has advocated the use of monetary policy rules to guide policy, as has Mr Quarles. …
At the same time, however, Mr Goodfriend has been willing to contemplate the use of deeply negative rates to stimulate growth — something that the Fed has thus far not embarked upon. In 1999 he wrote that negative rates were a feasible option, years before central banks started actually experimenting with them.
To implement negative rates while preserving cash, Goodfriend has advocated a flexible exchange rate between deposits and cash. On Alphaville, Matthew Klein quotes from a recent paper of Goodfriend’s:
The zero bound encumbrance on interest rate policy could be eliminated completely and expeditiously by discontinuing the central bank defense of the par deposit price of paper currency. … the central bank would no longer let the outstanding stock of paper currency vary elastically to accommodate the deposit demand for paper currency at par. …
The reason to abandon the pegged par deposit price of paper currency is analogous to the … reasons for abandoning the gold standard and fixed exchange rate: it is to let fluctuations in the deposit demand for paper currency be reflected in the deposit price of paper currency so as not to destabilize the general price level … the flexible deposit price of paper currency would behave as it actually did when the payment of paper currency for deposits was restricted in the United States during the banking crises of 1873, 1893, and 1907.
The Economist reported about the history of central banks and their independence. One snippet:
Typically, Richard Nixon took the bullying furthest, leaking a false story that Arthur Burns, Martin’s successor, was demanding a 50% pay rise. Attacked by the press, Burns retreated from his desire to raise interest rates.
On his blog, John Cochrane discusses the possibility of an alternative monetary policy regime in which the Fed tightly controls expected inflation. He states, repeatedly, that given our current understanding of the matter he would refrain from implementing such a regime if he became Fed chair (rather than stating that he would not currently advise to move in that direction). Given that Janet Yellen is expected to retire next year and John Cochrane is mentioned as a possible successor, I find the statement remarkable.
On his blog, John Cochrane reports about a Hoover panel including him, Charles Plosser, and John Taylor.
Cochrane focuses on the liability side. He favors a large quantity of (possibly interest bearing) reserves for financial stability reasons. Plosser focuses on the asset side and is worried about credit allocation by the Fed, for political economy reasons. Taylor favors a small balance sheet. Cochrane also talks about reserves for everyone, but issued by the Treasury.
On his blog, Roger Farmer advertizes his new book, “Prosperity for All,” and argues that governments should stabilize asset prices:
Following the Great Stagflation of the 1970s, economists backtracked and revived the classical economic theory that had dominated academic economics for a hundred and fifty years, beginning with Adam Smith in 1776 and culminating in the business cycle theory described by Keynes’s contemporary Arthur Pigou in his 1927 book, Industrial Fluctuations. That backtrack was a big mistake. It is time to realize that much, but not all, of Keynesian economics is correct. …
In my book Prosperity for All: How to Prevent Financial Crises, … I do not conclude that more government spending is the right way to cure a depression. Instead, I argue for a new policy in which central banks and national treasuries systematically intervene in financial markets to prevent the swings in asset prices that have such debilitating effects on all of our lives.
The control of asset prices will seem like a bold step to some, but so too did the control of the interest rates by the Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve System when it was first introduced in 1913. We do not have to accept hyperinflations of the kind that occurred in 1920s Germany. Nor should we be content with the 50% unemployment rates that plague young people in Greece today. By designing a new institution, based on the modern central bank, we can and must ensure Prosperity for All.
And in another post:
The New Keynesian agenda is the child of the neoclassical synthesis and, like the IS-LM model before it, New Keynesian economics inherits the mistakes of the bastard Keynesians. It misses two key Keynesian concepts: (1) there are multiple equilibrium unemployment rates and (2) beliefs are fundamental. My work brings these concepts back to center stage and integrates the Keynes of the General Theory with the microeconomics of general equilibrium theory in a new way.
On his blog, Ben Bernanke discusses the merits of the Fed’s strategy to slowly reduce the size of its balance sheet to pre crisis levels. Bernanke (with reference to a paper by Robin Greenwood, Samuel Hanson and Jeremy Stein) suggests that this strategy should be reconsidered:
First, the large balance sheet provides lots of safe and liquid assets for financial markets. This might strengthen financial stability. (DN: In my view, there are also reasons to expect the opposite.)
Second, a larger balance sheet can help improve the workings of the monetary transmission mechanism, in particular if non-banks can deposit funds at the Fed. Currently, the Fed accepts funds from private-sector institutional lenders such as money market funds, through the overnight reverse repurchase program (RRP). (DN: I agree. As I have argued elsewhere, access to central bank balance sheets should be broadened.)
Third, with a large balance sheet and thus, large bank reserve holdings to start with, it could be easier to avoid “stigma” in the next financial crisis when banks need to borrow cash from the Fed but prefer not to in order not to signal weakness. (DN: Like the first, this third argument emphasizes banks’ needs. In my view, monetary policy should not emphasize these needs too much because it is far from clear whether bank incentives are sufficiently aligned with the interests of society at large.)
Bernanke also discusses the reasons why the Fed does want to reduce the balance sheet size.
First, in a financial panic, programs like the RRP could result in market participants depositing more and more funds at the Fed until the interbank market would be drained of liquidity. But these programs could be capped.
Second, a large balance sheet increases the risk of large fiscal losses for the Fed and thus, the public sector. Losses could trigger a legislative response and undermine the Fed’s policy independence. But these risks could be kept in check if the Fed invested in government paper that constitutes a close substitute to cash, such as three year government debt. (DN: But why, then, shouldn’t financial market participants hold three year government debt rather than reserves at the Fed? Because cash is much more liquid than government debt … But what does this mean?)
In a paper, Larry Ball argues that
inadequate collateral and lack of legal authority were not the reasons that the Fed let Lehman fail. …
… the primary decision maker was Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson–even though he had no legal authority over the Fed’s lending decisions. … evidence supports the common theory that Paulson was influenced by the strong political opposition to financial rescues. … Another factor is that both Paulson and Fed officials, although worried about the effects of a Lehman failure, did not fully anticipate the damage that it would cause.
James Stewart comments in the New York Times.
In his blog, Ben Bernanke discusses the merits of “helicopter drops” as a monetary policy tool.
[A] “helicopter drop” of money is an expansionary fiscal policy—an increase in public spending or a tax cut—financed by a permanent increase in the money stock.
… the Fed credits the Treasury … in the Treasury’s “checking account” at the central bank, and those funds are used to pay for the new spending and the tax rebate.
… it should influence the economy through a number of channels, making it extremely likely to be effective—even if existing government debt is already high and/or interest rates are zero or negative. … the channels would include:
- the direct effects of the public works spending on GDP, jobs, and income;
- the increase in household income from the rebate, which should induce greater consumer spending;
- a temporary increase in expected inflation, the result of the increase in the money supply. Assuming that nominal interest rates are pinned near zero, higher expected inflation implies lower real interest rates, which in turn should incentivize capital investments and other spending; and
- the fact that, unlike debt-financed fiscal programs, a money-financed program does not increase future tax burdens.
[Debt financed spending programs lack channels 3 and 4.]
[Helicopter drops are subject to various] practical challenges of implementation, including integrating them into operational monetary frameworks and assuring appropriate governance and coordination between the legislature and the central bank.
In his blog, Ben Bernanke discusses the merits of longer-term interest rate targeting as a monetary policy tool.
A lot would depend on the credibility of the Fed’s announcement. If investors do not believe that the Fed will be successful at pushing down the two-year rate … they will immediately sell their securities of two years’ maturity or less to the Fed. … the Fed could end up owning most or all of the eligible securities, with uncertain consequences for interest rates overall. On the other hand, if the Fed’s announcement is fully credible, the prices of eligible securities might move immediately to the targeted levels, and the Fed might achieve its objective without acquiring many securities at all.
… A policy of targeting longer-term rates is related to quantitative easing in that both involve buying potentially large quantities of securities. An important difference is that one sets a quantity and the other sets a price. … Concerns about “losing control of the balance sheet” were a factor behind the Fed’s choice of quantitative easing over rate targets while I was chairman.
Conceivably, QE and rate-pegging could be used together … with QE working through reduced risk premiums while the rate peg operates indirectly by affecting the expected path of short-term interest rates. … The principal limitations of rate pegs are similar to those of forward guidance: Both tools are relatively less effective at affecting interest rates at longer maturities, and even at shorter horizons both must be consistent with a credible or “time-consistent policy” path for short-term interest rates.
On Econbrowser, Carl Walsh critically discusses H.R. 3189, The Fed Oversight Reform and Modernization (FORM) Act. He points out that the output gap measure in a policy rule plays an important role.
He writes:
Legislating a rule for the Fed’s instrument as a means of constraining its discretion and holding it accountable for its policy actions represents a fundamental shift from a policy such as inflation targeting. Under inflation targeting, the central bank is held accountable for meeting a target that represents an ultimate goal of monetary policy – low inflation – rather than for moving its policy instrument consistent with a specific rule. …
Using an estimated DSGE model, I find that the optimal weights to place on goal-based inflation and rule-based Taylor rule performance measures depend importantly on the output measure employed in the rule. When the rule is similar to that proposed recently in U.S. H.R. 3189, I find the optimal weight to assign to the rule-based performance measure is always equal to zero – that is, the rule H.R. 3189 proposed would lead to inferior macroeconomic outcomes and should not be used.
This result is largely driven by the fact that the definition of output used in the legislated rule – output relative to trend – is not consistent with the definition of output the theory behind the model I use would imply – output relative to its efficient level. When the Taylor rule is modified to use the measure of economic activity that is more consistent with basic macro theory, outcomes can be improved by making deviations from such the rule a part of a system for accessing the Fed’s performance and promoting its accountability.
In his FT blog, Larry Summers argues for a “quite radical” change in government debt-management. He proposes several lessons:
How should central banks communicate? In his blog, Ben Bernanke makes the case for the US system which has recently been criticized as resulting in “cacophony.” His points are:
George Pennacchi discusses narrow banking in an article in the Annual Review of Financial Economics. He concludes as follows:
During the nineteenth century, US banks were more narrow than they are today, and the narrowest (e.g., those under the Louisiana Banking Act of 1842) appeared resistant to panics. Common modern-banking practices, such as maturity transformation and explicit loan commitments, arose only after the creation of the Federal Reserve and the FDIC.
… There appears to be little or no benefits available from traditional banks that could not be obtained in a carefully designed narrow bank financial system. Most importantly, a narrow-banking system could have huge advantages in containing moral hazard and reducing the overall risk and required regulation of the financial system.
In contrast, the reaction by US regulators to the recent financial crisis was to expand the government’s safety net by raising deposit insurance limits and by giving more financial firms access to insured deposits. Expanding, rather than narrowing, the activities that are funded with insured deposits is justified if one believes that regulation can contain moral hazard when firms have many, complex risk-taking opportunities. Unfortunately, this belief appears dubious if one recognizes that regulators face political and information constraints.
In my view, there is a need for research that considers the optimal design of a financial system when a government regulator is limited in its ability to assess risk. … Research needs to better identify those financial services where government support would produce a net social benefit. Services such as maturity transformation and liquidity insurance may not deserve costly government guarantees. Finally, should further research support the general concept of narrow banking, there are still open questions regarding the specific features of these banks. In particular, how narrow should be these banks’ assets and should their liabilities should be deposits or equity shares (at fixed or floating NAVs) are questions that need better answers.
In a recent paper, Robin Greenwood, Sam Hanson, Josh Rudolph and Larry Summers discuss the joint effect of Fed and Treasury policy on the maturity structure of government liabilities in the hands of the private sector. John Cochrane commends the paper in a blog post.
Greenwood, Hanson, Rudolph and Summers make several points. First, “monetary and fiscal policies have been pushing in opposite directions in recent years.” In spite of QE, long-term government debt held by the private sector increased, mostly due to government deficits but also because the government lengthened the maturity of its debt. Second, Fed and Treasury policies largely are uncoordinated. They argue that this is suboptimal, in particular when the Fed strongly intervenes as it did in the recent QE episodes.
The Federal Reserve has focused purely on the effects that its bond purchases were expected to have on long-term interest rates and, by extension, the economy more broadly. … it completely ignored any possible impact on government fiscal risk, even though the Federal Reserve’s profits and losses are remitted to the Treasury. Conversely, Treasury’s debt management announcements and the advice of the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee (TBAC) have focused on the assumed benefits of extending the average debt maturity from a fiscal risk perspective, and largely ignored the impact of policy changes on long-term yields. To the extent that the Federal Reserve and Treasury ever publicly mention the other institution’s mandate, it is usually in the context of avoiding the perception that one institution might be helping the other achieve an objective. Specifically, the Fed does not want to be seen as monetizing deficits, while the Treasury has been reluctant to acknowledge the Fed as anything more than a large investor.
Third, they argue that from a consolidated government policy perspective, the optimal debt maturity structure is rather short. This saves on interest payments to the private sector (on average) and reduces “liquidity transformation” by the financial sector with dangerous consequences for financial stability. They downplay the risk sharing benefits of longer-term debt and argue that short-term debt has additional advantages at the zero lower bound.
Pages 11-12 contain the following figure, among others:
Narrow banking proposals are fashionable. Here is a selective list of contributions to the debate:
I have discussed pros and cons of narrow banking against the background of the Swiss “Vollgeldinitiative.” The issue of segregated cash accounts connects the narrow banking debate to the debate on government provided electronic money that I discuss in another post.
This post has been updated and extended after the initial publication.
