Connecting The Dots : Policy And The Credit Channel

Apart from the main function of monetary policy formulation and implementation, Arnold (2008), also gives other functions of the Federal Reserve System which include supplying the economy with paper money (Federal Reserve notes) in addition to serving as the lender of last resort. Being the last means that when other banks, especially the commercial banks, suffer from cash management or liquidity

The Federal Reserve increases its reserves by issuing loans to a commercial banking system. This allows the bank that is borrowing reserves to disburse credits to the public. The Federal Reserve Banks offer primary credit, secondary credit, and seasonal credit, to bank organizations each with its own interest rate. Depending on if the Fed wants to decrease or increase the interest rate can be a positive or negative effect to the public. If the rate is decreases it encourages banking organizations to get more loans. When this is done the banks acquire more funds and are able to disburse more loans the people.

Our economy is a machine that is ran by humans. A machine can only be as good as the person who makes it. This makes our economy susceptible to human error. A couple years ago the United States faced one of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, which was the Great Recession. The Great Recession was a severe economic downturn that occurred in 2008 following the burst of the housing market. The government tried passing bills to see if anything would help it from becoming another Great Depression. Trying to aid the government was the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve went through a couple strategies in order to help the economy recover. The Federal Reserve provided three major strategies to start moving the economy in a better direction. The first strategy was primarily focused on the central bank’s role of the lender of last resort. The second strategy was meant to provide provision of liquidity directly to borrowers and investors in key credit markets. The last strategy was for the Federal Reserve to expand its open market operations to support the credit markets still working, as well as trying to push long term interest rates down. Since time has passed on since the Great Recession it has been a long road. In this essay we will take a time to reflect on these strategies to see how they helped.

The Federal Reserve plays a vital role as the intermediary in clearing and settling interbank payments to assure that the millions of transactions performed each day are processed safely and efficiently. Acting as the “Banker’s Bank”, the Federal Reserve Banks provide various services to the nation’s banks such as check processing, electronic transfers, and ensuring there is enough cash in circulation to meet public demand. As fiscal agent for the U.S. government, the Reserve Banks pay Treasury checks and issue, transfer, and redeem U.S. government

The Federal Reserve System has three branches: the Board of Governors, The Federal Open Market Committee, and Reserve Banks. The Federal Reserve System (Fed) supplies and regulates America’s money to all the banks. The Board of Governors is the main authority of the three branches of the Fed, and it supervises other banks. The Federal Open Market Committee is the most prominent policymaker of the three branches and regulates the supply of money in the economy. Federal Reserve Banks serve other banks, this is why they are called banker’s banks. There are twelve Federal Reserve Banks which represent different states and these “districts” share data for monetary policies. The future role of monetary policy is vital

In the late 2007, early 2008 the United States and the world was hit with the most serious economic downturn since The Great Depression in 1929. During this time the Federal Reserve played a huge role in assuring that it would not turn into the second Great Depression. In this paper, we will be discussing what the Federal Reserve did during this time including a discussion of our nation’s three main economic goals which are GDP, employment, and inflation. My goal is to describe the historic monetary and fiscal policy efforts undertaken by the U.S. Government and Federal Reserve including both the traditional and non-traditional measures to ease credit markers and stimulate the economy.

The Federal Reserve System is the most powerful institution in the United States economy. Functioning as the central bank of the United States, acting as a regulator, the lender of last resort, and setting the nation’s monetary policy via the Federal Open Market Committee, there is no segment of the American economy unaffected by the Federal Reserve [endnoteRef:1]. This power becomes even more substantial in times of “unusual and exigent circumstances,” as Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act gives authority to the Board of Governors to act unilaterally in lending and market making operations during financial crisis[endnoteRef:2]. As illustrated by their decision making in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 Great Recession,

The Federal Reserve System was created by Congress in 1913 and passed the Federal Reserve Act in order to provide for a safer and more flexible banking and monetary system. According to the changing needs of the system, its objectives have been changing throughout the history of the Fed. At first, “its original purposes were to give the country an elastic currency, provide facilities for discounting commercial credits, and improve the supervision of the banking system under a decentralized bank.” (The Federal Reserve System, 1984, 1). Prior to its establishment (the Fed), the supply of bank credit and money was inelastic, thus resulting in an irregular flow of credit and money, and contributed to unstable economic development. These objectives were aspects economic policies and national monetary. However, through time, stability and growth of the economy, high employment levels, stability in the purchasing power of the dollar, and reasonable balance in transactions with foreign currencies have become to be recognized as primary objectives of the governmental economic policy.

One form of direct control can be exercised by adjusting the legal reserve ratio (the proportion of its deposits that a member bank must hold in its reserve account), and as a result, increasing or decreasing the amount of new loans that the commercial banks can make. Because loans give rise to new deposits, the possible money supply is, in this way, expanded or reduced. This policy tool has not been used too much in recent years. The money supply may also be influenced through manipulation of the discount rate, which is the rate if interest charged by the Federal Reserve banks on short-term secured loans to member banks. Since these loans are typically sought to maintain reserves at their required level, an increase in the cost of such loans has an effect similar to that of increasing the reserve requirement. The classic method of indirect control is through open-market operations, first widely used in the 1920s and now used daily to make some adjustment to the market. Federal Reserve bank sales or purchases of securities on the open market tend to reduce or increase the size of commercial bank reserves. When the Federal Reserve sells securities, the purchasers pay for them with checks drawn on their deposits, thereby reducing the reserves of the banks on which the checks are drawn. The three instruments of control explained above have been conceded to be more effective in preventing inflation in times of high economic activity than in bringing about revival from a

14-7. When a bank is deficient in reserves, it can go to the federal funds market to borrow what it needs from another bank.

The recent financial crisis has a huge impact on systemic Important Financial Institutions; it’s distressing effect can be felt in almost every business area and process of a bank. A fairly large literature investigates the impact of financial crisis on large, complex and interconnected banks. The great recession did affect banks in different ways, depending on the funding capability of each bank. Kapan and Minoiu (2013) find that banks that were ex ante more dependent on market funding and had lower structural liquidity reduced supply of credit more than other banks during crisis. The ability of banks to generate interest income during the financial crisis was hampered because there was a vast reduction in bank lending to individuals and

This has the effect of bringing down interest rates, injecting money into the economy, and thus encouraging borrowing and spending. However, when interest rates are at or near zero and the economy still requires stimulus (a dangerous situation now referred to as a “liquidity trap”) (Blinder 466), central banks must use more extreme methods to resuscitate the economy.

According to Keister and McAndrews (2009), there is a very simple explanation for the huge amounts of money being held as excess reserves by banks. In their article, "Why Are Banks Holding So Many Excess Reserves?" Keister and McAndrews explore the nature of reserves in a normal economic situation comparing it with the crisis situation "following the collapse of Lehman Brothers" in 2008 (Keister and McAndrews, 2009). Though some would argue that the amount of excess reserves currently being held would indicate a failure on the part of the policies implemented by the Federal Reserve, Keister and McAndrews argue that it is merely a reflection of the scale of the policies implemented as well as a result of the Federal Reserve now paying interest on reserves (Keister and McAndrews, 2009). Further, Keister and McAndrews (2009), assert that by now paying interest on the reserves, the Central Bank can now control the target interest rate without manipulating reserves. Additionally, Keister and McAndrews (2009,) conclude that the, 'size of the reserves only reflects the size of the Federal Reserve's policy initiatives and indicate almost nothing about the effectiveness of these initiatives.'

Following the crisis of Fannie Mae and Freddie Macin Summer 2007, which is the beginning of the financial crisis of 2008, John et al (2012) find that Bank of England kept on providing liquidity to banks and making an exchange between high-quality assets and Treasury Bills through liquidity support operations and financial innovations which were also used by many other central banks. Adopting this approach means that Bank of England can make the financial sectors more easily to receive financing on such circumstance (Joyce

After the financial crisis happened in 1997, many economies are interested in evaluating the performance of monetary policy in softening inflation, affecting investment and other economic indicators. Central banks lowered the policy rate to nearly zero so as to ease the intense economic situation (Meaning and Zhu (2011)). Interest rate pass-though can be defined as the degree and the speed of monetary policy rate into retail banking rate. In order to stable the price level, central banks have to know well about to what extend the interest rate mechanism amends inflation. More precisely, it is essential to estimate whether the transmission from the government policy rate to retail rates is complete. The reason is simple: retail banking rates can be viewed as a indicator that has impact on real economy because it can affect the demand and supply of loans and deposit. The higher the interest rate pass-though, the closer link between monetary policy rate and retail rates, which means the retail banking rates can react quickly, that also provides an effective interest rate channel. An incomplete interest rate pass-through can lead to the invalidation of the Taylor rule (Marotta, 2009). This can be indicated from a rough indicator, lending spreads, (i.e, the difference between lending and policy rates). Early studies on the transmission mechanism of monetary policy