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Showing posts from December, 2019

The blind Federal Reserve

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Ever since the secured overnight repo rate (SOFR) spiked to 10% in September, there have been dire warnings that these exceptional movements show the financial system is fundamentally broken. The story goes that the post-crisis financial system is so dysfunctional that it is unable to operate without continual injections of money from central banks. The Fed's attempt to reduce the $4.2tn of reserves it added to the financial system in three rounds of QE has dangerously destabilised the financial system, so it has now had to re-start asset purchases to restore the lost reserves and refloat tottering banks. It's fair to say that much has changed since the financial crisis. Prior to 2008, banks maintained far lower levels of reserves than they do now, typically at or just above their reserve requirement. They borrowed reserves from each other in the unsecured interbank market to settle customer deposit withdrawals and securities transactions. The Federal Reserve intervened