Fed Injects Tens Of Trillions Into Markets As Liquidity Dries-Up (#GotBitcoin?)

The Fed said Thursday that its balance sheet stood at $4.18 trillion as of Wednesday, versus $3.8 trillion in September. Peak Fed holdings were $4.5 trillion. About $229.5 billion in repo interventions were also outstanding on Wednesday, versus $210.6 billion on Jan. 9. Fed Injects Tens Of Trillions Into Markets As Liquidity Dries-Up (#GotBitcoin?)

Related:

The Fed Is Setting The Stage For Hyper-Inflation Of The Dollar (#GotBitcoin?)

Updated: 1-24-2020

* The Federal Reserve on Tuesday sold $105 billion in market repurchase agreements, or repos, in a continued effort to calm money markets and bring interest rates within its intended range.

* The bank offered $75 billion in repos expiring overnight and $30 billion in repos expiring in 14 days. Banks bid for more than was available of each repo, signaling strong demand for the government-backed asset.

* The bank began a streak of repo offerings last week, marking the first time such assets were sold since the 2008 financial crisis. The central bank said the offerings would continue through early October.

Repo And Reverse Repo Operations (Total Amount Of Money Pumped Into The Banks)

The Federal Reserve added $105 billion to the nation’s financial system on Tuesday in two transactions, seeking to calm money markets and keep interest rates in its intended range.

The New York Fed continued its streak of market repurchase agreements, or repos, selling $75 billion of overnight repos and $30 billion of repos expiring in 14 days.

Banks bid for $80.2 billion in overnight repos and $62 billion in 14-day repos, signaling strong demand in the government-backed investments.

Last week marked the first time in a decade that the bank had taken such steps to relieve pressure on money markets. The bank offered a total of $278 billion in repos from Tuesday through Friday.

Also last week, the Federal Open Market Committee cut its benchmark interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point, landing in a window of 1.75% to 2%. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell called the repo offerings a temporary action.

“Funding pressures in money markets were elevated this week, and the effective federal funds rate rose above the top of its target range,” he said.

The Fed’s schedule calls for another $75 billion of overnight repos to be sold every business day until October 10, with certain days also offering at least $30 billion worth of 14-day repos.

Repo Market Meltdown Shows Bitcoin’s ‘Systemic’ Stability: Caitlin Long

Wyoming Blockchain Coalition president Caitlin Long has responded to the recent unrest in the money markets by analyzing the systemic fragility of the traditional financial sector as compared with Bitcoin (BTC).

In a Medium blog post published on Sept. 25, Long made the argument that “at a systemic level, the traditional financial system is as fragile as Bitcoin is antifragile.”
Damage “control”

Writing in the wake of last week’s weakness in the repo markets — which prompted the Federal Reserve to temporarily inject $75 billion in cash to keep rates within its target range — Long argued that the incident represented “a modern version of a bank run.” She continued:

“And It’s Not Over Yet. Stepping Back, It Reveals Two Big Things About Financial Markets:

first, US Treasuries are not truly ‘risk-free’ assets […] and second, big banks are significantly undercapitalized. The event doesn’t mean another financial meltdown is necessarily imminent […] since the brush fire can be doused either by the Fed, or by the banks raising more equity capital.”

The liquidity squeeze — which pushed overnight repo rates to as high as 10%, well north of the Fed’s target 2-2.25% range — had been triggered by the coincidence of corporate tax payments and Treasury settlements falling on the same date.

Yet rather than being a one-off instance of exceptional, unfortunate pressure on the lending markets, Long notes that this is the fourth such episode since the 2008 meltdown.

She critiques the Fed’s assertion this June — made on the occasion of the publication of its most recent bank stress tests — that “the financial system remains resilient,” arguing that the proclamation “strains credulity.” She further notes that:

“A staggering amount of US dollar liabilities have been issued offshore in recent decades and the Fed not only doesn’t control them but can’t measure them with any degree of accuracy.”

Bitcoin: An Insurance Policy Against Systemic Instability

This inherent obfuscation — particularly glaring when it comes to highly re-hypothecated assets such as U.S. Treasuries — was importantly conceded by the Chairman of the CFTC, Chris Giancarlo during questions following a 2016 speech. He remarked that:

“At the heart of the financial crisis, perhaps the most critical element was the lack of visibility into the counter-party credit exposure of one major financial institution to another. Probably the most glaring omission that needed to be addressed was that lack of visibility, and here we are in 2016 and we still don’t have it.”

In conclusion, Long makes the case that while commentators frequently point to volatile price performance when it comes to Bitcoin, it is significantly more stable systemically:

“Bitcoin’s price is highly volatile, but as a system, it is more stable […] Bitcoin is not a debt-based system that periodically experiences bank run-like instability. In this regard, Bitcoin is an insurance policy against financial market instability. Bitcoin is no one’s IOU. It has no lender of last resort because it doesn’t need one.”

Earlier this month, crypto fund executive Travis Kling argued that that the specific properties of Bitcoin make it an exceptional hedge against monetary and fiscal irresponsibility from central banks and governments globally.

New York Fed Boosts Size of Repurchase Operations

Overnight loans rise to $100 billion from $75 billion.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York said Wednesday it would increase the size of scheduled operations to provide short-term cash loans to financial firms.

The Fed said it would increase the size of overnight cash loans offered Thursday through the market for repurchase agreements, or repos, to $100 billion from $75 billion, while doubling the size of a two-week offering Thursday to $60 billion.

Banks asked the Fed for about $92 billion in overnight reserves Wednesday, offering collateral in the form of Treasury and mortgage securities, compared with the $75 billion provided by the central bank.

The decision to increase the size of the loans in the repo market, where borrowers offer collateral such as Treasury bonds in exchange for cash over very short periods, follows recent operations where banks have bid for more cash than the Fed had offered. This was most notable Monday after banks submitted bids for more than twice the $30 billion of two-week loans offered by the Fed.

Demand to borrow cash in the repo market is expected to increase as the end of the quarter approaches. Banks often opt to hold more cash at the end of fiscal quarters to ensure that they have enough liquid assets to protect against potential losses.

The Fed could continue to offer cash to financial firms through the repo market for the rest of the year, said Jerry Pucci, who oversees repo trading at BlackRock Inc., Tuesday at a conference held by the New York Fed.

The Fed’s decision to add reserves is intended to prevent a cash shortfall at that crucial period. The cost to borrow cash rose as high as 10% last week as cash left the financial system following quarterly corporate tax payments and the settlement of Treasury auctions. A surge in demand at the end of last year pushed repo rates to as high as 6%.

Updated: 9-18-2019

The Federal Reserve injected $75 billion into U.S. money markets as policy makers’ benchmark rate broke outside their preferred band, ratcheting up the pressure on central bank officials to find a long-term fix for the financial system’s plumbing. Fed Injects $75 Billion Into Markets As Liquidity Dries-Up

The moves underscored just how deep the structural problems in U.S. money markets have become. Namely, there is often not enough cash on hand at major Wall Street firms to meet the funding demands of a market trying to absorb record Treasury bond sales needed to cover U.S. budget deficits. The solution, according to longtime observers, would be for the Fed to continue to inject cash on a regular basis.

“The underlying problem is that there isn’t enough liquidity in the system to satisfy the demand and the job of the central bank is to provide such liquidity,” said Roberto Perli, a former Fed economist and partner at Cornerstone Macro in Washington. “What the Fed did was just a patch.”

Morgan Stanley Sees Fed Starting Permanent Open Market Ops

The Fed is likely to announce permanent open market operations in its communications today, Morgan Stanley strategist Matt Hornbach said on Bloomberg TV.

“The buffer of reserves that the Fed was hoping to have in the system clearly isn’t there any more,” Hornbach said.

Using POMOs will avoid the implication that the Fed is restarting quantitative easing, which could raise fears of a recession or a systemic problem.

“When you start losing control of the target rate, you need to increase reserves in the system, but that’s not necessarily QE as we know it in a traditional sense,” Hornbach said. “They’re going to do this via permanent open market operations.”

There is evidence things are calming down. For instance, the rate for general collateral repurchase agreements has dropped to 2.175%, down from Tuesday’s record high of 10% and about where it was last week.

‘This Is Crazy!’: Fed’s Repo Madness Sends Wall Street Reeling

Now attention turns to this afternoon’s Federal Open Market Committee decision to see what, if any, further steps are taken to remove pressure from the overnight lending business and ensure higher rates don’t harm other parts of the economy. Action is nearly certain after the New York Fed said Wednesday that the effective fed funds rate busted through policy makers’ 2.25% cap the day before, coming in at 2.30%. That’s bad because it shows the Fed is losing its grip on short-term interest rates, undermining its ability to guide the financial system.

Adjusting something called the interest rate on excess reserves, or IOER, is one likely remedy. Longer-term solutions include expanding the Fed’s balance sheet to replenish reserves in the banking system.

“These money markets are a very powerful part of the financial system and everything flows through,” said John Herrmann at MUFG Securities in New York. “What the Fed has been doing so far to address the issues is like being a fire department chasing the fire instead of sort of installing fire hydrants through facility. They need to do more.”

The New York Fed Declined Comment

The Fed’s dose of cash Wednesday follows a $53.2 billion liquidity injection Tuesday. It had been more than a decade since traders at the central bank jumped into U.S. money markets to add cash. And they seemed to get the reaction they wanted Tuesday morning, instantaneously driving down key short-term rates that had spiked, threatening to muck up everything from Treasury bond trading to lending to companies and consumers.

But The Move Didn’t Last Long

By the end of the trading session, rates were grinding back up, prompting Fed officials to fire off a second missive late in the day: They would be back Wednesday morning to offer another $75 billion of cash.

A couple of catalysts caused the liquidity squeeze in this esoteric, yet vital, corner of finance known as repurchase agreements.

There was a big swath of new Treasury debt that settled into the marketplace — adding to dealer balance sheet holdings — just as cash was sucked out by quarterly tax payments companies needed to send to the government. If left unchecked, the escalation in rates could do damage to the broader economy by hiking borrowing costs for companies and consumers.

The timing couldn’t have been worse, with Fed leaders and many key New York Fed staffers gathered in Washington for a two-day policy meeting that will end Wednesday. Fed officials are widely expected to cut their target rate by a quarter-point. But the money-market problem threatens to overshadow that, as Wall Street is ready to find out the Fed’s long-term solution is.

“The increase in repo and other short-term rates is indicative of the reduced amount of balance sheet that financial intermediaries — particularly primary dealers — are either willing or able to provide those in search of short-term financing,” said Tony Crescenzi, market strategist at Pacific Investment Management Co. and author of a 2007 edition of “Stigum’s Money Market,” a widely read textbook first published in 1978. “It serves as a reminder of the challenges that investors could face in other ways if and when they seek to transfer risk — sell their risk assets — during a risk-off mode.”

This is far from the first bout of volatility in the over $2 trillion repo market, but eye-catching moves tend to happen only at quarter- or year-end when liquidity sometimes dries up — not in the middle of the month, as it is now. Even setting aside this week’s huge spike, turmoil has been more pronounced following the 2008 crisis because reforms designed to safeguard the financial system have driven some banks out of this market. Fewer traders can lead to rapid swings by creating imbalances between supply and demand.

Fed interventions in the repo market, like the ones deployed Tuesday and Wednesday, were commonplace for decades before the crisis. Then they stopped when the central bank changed how it enacted policy by expanding its balance sheet and using a target rate band.

The tumult seen Monday and Tuesday doesn’t mean another global funding crisis, even though trouble getting funds through repo a decade ago doomed Lehman Brothers and almost snuffed out the global financial system.

But, many experts say, these wild few days show that there’s not enough reserves — or excess money that banks park at the Fed — in the banking system. That means traders are this week having to pay up to get these funds, even as bank reserves total more than $1 trillion. And it suggests the Fed may again have to grow its $3.8 trillion balance sheet through quantitative easing, or debt purchases that create fresh reserves.

There are other remedies. The Fed has considered introducing a new tool, an overnight repo facility, that could be used to reduce pressure in money markets. And some strategists predict it may make another technical tweak to IOER, something that’s already been done three times since last year in an attempt to keep markets in line.

“There were a confluence of factors that triggered the issues this week,” said Darrell Duffie, a Stanford University finance professor who’s co-authored research on repos with Fed staffers. “But the fact that it’s happening means something at the Fed should be done. For the Fed to be really confident in ending the issues, they will have to grow the balance sheet.”

The U.S. government has made matters worse over the past year by adding a record amount of new debt, and that will likely only increase as the deficit swells past $1 trillion. That has buoyed the amount of debt that dealers have on their balance sheets, and the repo market is one way they finance those positions. That said, their Treasury holdings are down from a peak in May, so that’s not necessarily behind this week’s big moves.

“Supply is a backdrop contributor to the issues, as there is just that much more collateral that needs to be financed,” said Seth Carpenter, a former adviser to the Fed Board of Governors who is now chief U.S. economist at UBS Securities LLC. “The market is still trying to deal with tight balance sheets from dealers. Overall this is all part of the market shifting through time to a new set of realities.”

Bank Reserves: What Are They And Why A Shortage Is Roiling A Key Interest Rate 

Not many people realize this, but there are two basic types of money in the world.

Bank reserves are normally obscure, even to bankers and professional investors. But this week they have hit the news when a shortage of them caused a key measure of borrowing costs—known as the overnight repo rate—to spike. That’s a worry, because typically these more wonky areas of finance only become interesting when something is going wrong.

The overnight repo rate, which is what banks and other financial players charge each other to lend cash in exchange for supersafe bonds, should be close to 2%, but it shot up almost as high as 10% on Tuesday. One of the underlying causes of this is a scarcity of reserves compared with the amount of Treasury bonds in the market. That has made banks less willing to lend to each other even in exchange for safe government bonds.

To settle markets down, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has dipped into this market, conducting three auctions this week where banks could swap Treasurys (or bonds from institutions like Fannie Mae ) for new reserves. It conducted a third auction on Thursday morning and offered $75 billion in repos.

Here’s Is A Simplified Rundown Of What Reserves Are And How They’ve Come To Matter.

What Are Reserves?

Not many people realize this, but there are two basic types of money in the world.

There is central bank money, which is known as reserves, and there is money that the rest of us use.

Central bank money can only be used by banks, governments and some government-linked institutions. They have this money in accounts at the central bank, where it is called “reserves.” The money that the rest of us use is private money that is created by ordinary banks.

There Is Also Some Special Central Bank Money That Everyone Can Use: The Notes And Coins In Our Wallets

What Are Reserves For?

The main day-to-day function of reserves is for banks to make payments to each other that reflect transactions between the rest of us. When one person transfers money to another person, it looks like private money moves from one bank account to another.

But that’s not what really happens. In fact, the first person’s bank reduces the amount in the person’s checking account, which is really just a record of money the bank owes to them. It then sends an equivalent amount of reserves to the second person’s bank. That bank now owes the second person more money and so it increases the value of their deposit with private money.

The same is true when your employer pays you your wages (assuming you don’t get them in notes and coins anyway), or when you pay for your groceries with a debit card.

Where Do Reserves Come From?

One way reserves find their way into the banking system is when a government spends money. Whether it wants to pay government workers’ wages or buy cruise missiles, it sends reserves from a government’s central-bank account to the central-bank account of the ordinary bank used by the person or company who is getting the money. That bank then increases the value of the deposit in the accounts of workers or cruise missile suppliers.

The government can get some of those reserves back by selling a Treasury bond to investors, which is done via primary dealers, banks who have a special role acting as market makers for government bonds. The bond sale is paid for, or settled, using reserves from the banks that have the deposit accounts of those investors.

Where Does QE Come In?

The whole point of QE—quantitative easing—was to ease the pain of the financial crisis by flooding the financial system with money, which would make all kinds of borrowing significantly cheaper.

Central banks did this by creating trillions of dollars (or euros or Japanese yen) worth of reserves to buy back government bonds from investors via banks. This gave banks vast amounts of reserves. In turn, the banks gave those selling the bonds equally vast amounts of new private money. That private money could then be spent in the economy or used to buy riskier corporate bonds for example. The higher demand for other forms of debt would make that debt cheaper for borrowers.

And Then The Federal Reserve Started To Reverse QE?

Yes, the Fed stopped buying Treasurys when it felt the economy was on solid footing. When the bonds that it owned matured, the government had to repay the Fed. The government did this by handing reserves back to the Fed which the Fed then destroyed, reversing the process when it bought the bonds in the first place.

Reserves also leave the banking system when the government sells new Treasurys to private investors or when it collects taxes. Tax payments are special because governments, unlike companies or private citizens, deal directly in reserves. That means a tax payment involves reserves being transferred from an ordinary bank to a government account at the central bank. An equivalent amount of private money in the taxpayer’s bank account disappears.

The Upshot: New Sales Of Treasury Bonds And Tax Payments Take Reserves Out Of The Banking System.

So Why Does This All Suddenly Matter Now?

This is the trillion-dollar question. The answer, according to some analysts, is that the Fed isn’t sure how much reserves banks need these days. New rules since the crisis and the stress tests that banks have to beat have together increased the amount of reserves they want to hold.

But reserves have been shrinking because of the reversal of QE, increased government borrowing in the Treasury market, and a recent wave of tax payments, among other things.

One key cause of the crunch in overnight lending markets is that there are more Treasurys around than banks want to own, but some banks are still being forced to buy them. These are the so-called primary dealers who buy Treasurys from the government and then sell them to investors.

If banks don’t want to spend their own reserves to buy Treasury bonds they have to borrow those reserves from elsewhere. They can do that directly in specialist bank-only markets, or they can try to borrow private money in overnight lending markets, where rates spiked this week.

That is why the short-term fix has been for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to offer to take some of those Treasurys in exchange for new reserves. The longer-term solution could be a more permanent arrangement where the Fed conducts regular auctions. Unless that is, it turns out that the problem isn’t just with banks, but that there is a real need for funding coming from somewhere else in the system that hasn’t yet been identified.

Fed Will Weigh Resuming Balance Sheet Growth At October Meeting

Decision To Add New Treasuries Would Represent A Resumption Of Crisis-Era Quantitative Easing Stimulus

A sudden spike in overnight lending rates this week is forcing the Federal Reserve to consider growing its holdings of Treasury securities for the first time in five years, putting a decision on the agenda for its meeting next month.

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said Wednesday the central bank would be studying whether to increase its holdings, sometimes referred to as its balance sheet, carefully before approving any action at its Oct. 29-30 meeting.

“It is certainly possible that we will need to resume the organic growth of the balance sheet earlier than we thought,” he said at a news conference. “We’ll be looking at this carefully in coming days and taking it up at the next meeting.”

A decision to resume the growth of the Fed’s balance sheet wouldn’t mark the start of a new bond-buying program to stimulate economic growth by lowering long-term interest rates, like those the Fed began in several rounds after the 2008 financial crisis.

Instead, the Fed would begin buying small amounts of Treasury securities on a regular basis to prevent the amount of money in the banking system from declining. This marks a return to the normal precrisis practice of allowing the Fed’s balance sheet to grow in line with the broader economy.

A decision to do so also wouldn’t on its own fix recent cash shortages in money markets. The New York Fed has moved to inject up to $75 billion in those markets daily since Tuesday to help pull down interest rates and announced it will do so again on Friday.

Fed officials didn’t decide the matter this week, instead preferring to study how the financial system is digesting their five-year effort to drain reservoirs of cash to reverse their crisis-era stimulus.

Analysts at Evercore ISI expect the Fed will need to buy $8 billion to $14 billion in Treasurys every month to prevent bank deposits, known as reserves, from declining; that is on top of around $35 billion in Treasurys it is buying to replace retiring bonds and mortgage-backed securities.

Central bank officials said this spring that they would stop shrinking their Treasury holdings, a decision that took effect last month. But they never said when they would allow their holdings to grow again.

The Fed’s balance sheet is composed of $3.8 trillion in assets—primarily Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities—and liabilities, including the reserves that were created to purchase the assets.

The Fed stopped buying bonds to spur the economy in 2014 and began slowly shrinking the holdings in 2017 to reduce the stimulus, which drained reserves from the system. Reserves have fallen to less than $1.5 trillion from a high of $2.8 trillion

In the normal course of business, the Fed’s balance sheet should grow to keep up with demand for the Fed’s liabilities, which include currency in circulation and the Treasury’s general financing account.

The amount of currency in circulation has grown to $1.7 trillion from less than $800 billion in 2007. During periods when the Fed has held its balance sheet steady, reserves decline if the Fed’s other liabilities rise, removing cash from markets.

The Fed’s balance sheet doubled between 1994 and 2007—well before it started its bond-buying stimulus programs, sometimes called quantitative easing, or QE.

“By expanding its balance sheet, the Fed would simply accommodate the market demand for liquidity, not provide excess liquidity, which is a characteristic implicit in QE,” said Roberto Perli, an analyst at Cornerstone Macro, in a note to clients Tuesday.

The decision to resume growth of the balance sheet isn’t a big surprise. Several Fed officials said earlier this year they didn’t want to reduce reserves to levels that might fuel volatility in short-term money markets. A seasonal cash crunch on Monday, however, did just that.

Corporate tax payments and settlements of government bond sales resulted in a large transfer of cash from the banking system to the Treasury, fueling a spike in overnight lending rates, including the Fed’s benchmark federal-funds rate.

The fed-funds rate traded at 2.3% on Tuesday, according to the New York Fed, rising above the central bank’s target range between 2% and 2.25%.

Separately, the Fed lowered the range by a quarter percentage point on Wednesday to cushion the economy against risks from trade policy uncertainty and slowing global growth.

Tuesday’s rate jumps raise the possibility the Fed misjudged the appropriate level of reserves or that broader plumbing issues are interfering with the ability of banks and other broker-dealers to move cash, which could require a larger volume of reserves to keep markets running smoothly.

Determining when to stop the decline in reserves is “is probably more art than science,” said Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren in an interview earlier this year.

When it comes to determining the right point to stabilize reserves, “we’ve always said that the level is uncertain,” Mr. Powell said Wednesday. “I think we’ll learn quite a lot in the next six weeks.”

Fed officials face other thorny questions after that, including whether to change the mix of the Treasury securities they are purchasing and whether to become more involved in money markets by creating a new standing facility that would reduce volatility in participants’ demand for cash.

Powell’s Subtle Messaging To Trump On Trade Fight

Fed chairman mentioned trade 20 times at his news conference on Wednesday.

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell ’s press conference this week carried a subtle message for President Trump: If you’re worried about an economic slowdown, find a way to cool down the trade war.

Mr. Powell, of course, didn’t spell this out so explicitly.

As has been his custom, he pointedly declined to respond to Mr. Trump’s latest insults on Twitter Wednesday, when he said Mr. Powell had “no ‘guts,’ no sense.” Mr. Trump has tweeted disapprovingly about the Fed more than 30 times since the Fed cut rates in July.

Still, in his past three public appearances, Mr. Powell has more strongly signaled his concern that recent market turmoil, including a swift decline in long-term bond yields last month, reflected worries that the U.S.-China trade war was hurting business confidence and investment.

Trade disputes ratcheted up in May when Mr. Trump declared an escalation of trade tariffs on China when negotiations over a trade agreement broke down. Later, he threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico to address concerns over border security.

Trade developments have been “up and down and then up, I guess—or back up, perhaps—over the course of this intermeeting period,” Mr. Powell said Wednesday. “In any case, they’ve been quite volatile.”

Mr. Powell mentioned trade 20 times at his news conference on Wednesday. Other geopolitical risks figured less prominently or not at all. Mr. Powell mentioned Brexit once, and tensions in Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia didn’t come up.

“The thing we can’t address, really, is what businesses would like, which is a settled road map for international trade. We can’t do that. We don’t have that tool,” Mr. Powell said. “But we do have a very powerful tool which can counteract weakness to some extent by supporting demand through sound monetary policy.”

Mr. Powell said business contacts across the country have reported being discouraged from making new investments because of trade-related uncertainty.

Business executives have sent Mr. Trump and his advisers a similar message, particularly after he escalated trade tariffs and threatened to bar U.S. firms from doing business in China last month.

Fed officials voted to cut rates Wednesday by a quarter-percentage point for the second time in as many months, though the vote on the 10-person rate-setting committee wasn’t unanimous. Two dissenters favored holding rates steady, while one preferred a larger, half-point cut.

The Fed’s benchmark rate is now in a range between 1.75% and 2%.

In an interview Thursday on the Fox Business Network, White House economic adviser Lawrence Kudlow said the Fed’s recent move was a “step in the right direction.” He added, “They probably have more work to do…and I reckon they’ll probably get there.”

Mr. Kudlow brushed aside a question over whether trade-related uncertainty was harming business investment. Recent data on manufacturing activity showed improvement, he said, and he predicted a pickup in spending on business equipment.

For his part, Mr. Powell said he didn’t mean to suggest the Fed’s tools haven’t had any effect. The Fed’s pivot away from raising interest rates at the start of the year to holding them steady during the spring to cutting them this summer helped keep the economic outlook favorable, he said.

“We do have a very powerful tool which can counteract weakness to some extent,” Mr. Powell said. He added: “I was pointing out that there is a piece of this that we really can’t address.”

Fed Says It Will Extend Repo Operations Through At Least Oct. 10

Fed Adds $75 Billion In Fourth Repo Transaction This Week

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York will offer to add at least $75 billion daily to the financial system through Oct. 10, prolonging its efforts to relieve funding pressure in money markets.

In addition to at least $75 billion in overnight loans, the New York Fed said in a news release it will also offer three separate 14-day repo contracts of at least $30 billion each next week. The Fed will conduct further operations as needed after Oct. 10.

On Friday banks asked for $75.55 billion in reserves, $550 million more than the amount offered by the Fed, offering collateral in the form of Treasury and mortgage securities.

The Fed’s operation was the fourth time this week it has intervened to calm roiled money markets. Rates on short-term repos briefly spiked to nearly 10% earlier this week as financial firms looked for overnight funding. The actions marked the first time since the financial crisis that the Fed had taken such measures.

What Billions In Fed Repo Injections Reveal About The Promise Of Bitcoin

Last week, the Federal Reserve injected $278 billion into the securities repurchase, or “repo,” market over four days, all so that banks could meet their liquidity needs. It was the first time the Fed had intervened in this vital interbank market, where banks’ pawn financial assets to fund overnight cash needs, since the financial crisis of 2008.

Fed officials and bankers dismissed the rare liquidity breakdown as a hiccup stemming from a series of coincidental factors in bond markets and corporate tax payments. It wasn’t a very comforting explanation, not when other economic warning signs are flashing, too: $17 trillion in bonds worldwide showing negative yields; a worsening U.S.-China trade war; and manufacturing indicators signaling an impending global recession.

Predictably, certain crypto types have viewed this alarming scenario with glee. More than a few HODLing tweeters responded to the repo story with two words of advice: “buy bitcoin.”

But it’s actually hard to predict what all this means for crypto markets, at least in the short- to medium-term.

If and when a 2008-like financial panic takes hold, will bitcoin rally as a new kind of uncorrelated “safe haven” or will it decline in a broad-based “risk-off” dumping of all things speculative? (Notwithstanding a sharp dip and rebound midway through last week, bitcoin has proven quite stable of late, at least by its own volatile standards.)

Other questions: do these vulnerabilities in traditional credit markets highlight the promise of new blockchain-based ideas? For example, would wider use of security tokens allow speedier settlement and, by extension, reduced counterparty risks and greater market confidence? Or, far more radically, would MakerDAO’s on-chain #DeFi lending markets enable a more reliable clearing mechanism, with collateral calls locked in by a decentralized protocol? Or might these underdeveloped ideas simply be recipes for systemic risk, a single hack or software glitch away from setting off a vicious spiral of collateral calls and bankruptcies?

The Jury Is Out On All This Untested Stuff.

Still, if nothing else, the many signs of stress in the traditional financial system offer a valuable framework for thinking about how the world could be different and the role blockchain technology might play in enabling that new world.

Let’s Look At Some Of Them:

Negative-Yields

The rare phenomenon, where creditors are essentially paying issuers for the privilege of lending them money – head scratcher, right? – reflects excessive demand for “safe” assets, especially for government-issued bonds. It has historically been a strong indicator of impending recession, since it reflects an overwhelming reluctance among investors to take on risk.

Now, another way of thinking about that reluctance is to express it as a perceived shortage of good investment opportunities. That perception can be fueled by a worsening economic outlook, but it’s also dictated by the barriers to entry that make it difficult for otherwise investable businesses of offer new opportunities.

Here, certain blockchain-based credit ideas offer hope. There’s the prospect for distributed-ledger asset registries that better track collateral and enable new emerging-market lending in developing-country land, commodities and energy markets. Or there are ideas such as having exporters tokenize their receivables to tackle a major structural limit on global trade finance, where a majority of small-and-medium enterprise are denied letters of credit because bankers don’t trust their documentation.

Effective use of blockchain technology could boost trust in assets and lien registries and help bring to life the $20 trillion in “dead capital” that economist Hernando de Soto says the world’s poor are sitting on.

Just as importantly, it would open a world of new alternative assets to draw in investors’ capital, giving them less of a reason to park it in low-yielding bonds.

Global Economic Slowdown

An alarming, synchronized downturn in manufacturing indicators, most notably in purchasing manager indexes, which measure current and future business spending on inventory and equipment, flows directly from the U.S.-China trade war. In cutting off Chinese goods exporters from U.S. consumer markets and driving up costs for their U.S. importers – and vice versa for U.S. farmers selling to food distributors in China – the conflict has added a massive new burden on global economic activity.

But let’s look at the starting point for this trade battle. It lies in American companies’ mostly legitimate complaints about China’s mercantilist, centrally planned approach to supporting Chinese companies at their expense, all enabled by a system of surveillance and control over people and businesses. This where there’s a crypto angle.

Cryptocurrency and other decentralizing technologies could work against the Chinese government’s capacity to control its economy in this interventionist manner. If Chinese businesses and hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens used bitcoin to circumvent capital controls, for example, the ever-present risk of monetary flight would act as a pressure valve, compelling Beijing to pursue a more open economic model to maintain competitiveness. That would give anti-free-traders like President Trump less of an excuse to ratchet up protectionist attacks against it.

The Repo Intervention

Some innovators have sought to apply blockchain technology to the back-office structural problems that periodically roil money markets, such as those now manifest in repo. They see a distributed ledger as a superior mechanism for tracking the IOUs of money and pawned securities upon which inter-institutional credit markets are based.

One was former J.P. Morgan credit market maven Blythe Masters, who founded Digital Asset Holdings in 2014 on the idea that on-chain settlement and a universally auditable ledger could improve transparency in global finance’s opaque, complex matrix of interconnected credit relationships. This way, she argued, it could mitigate the mistrust and counterparty risks that fueled the financial crisis.

The DAH model and those of others working on back-office blockchain solutions for capital markets have not come to fruition. This is at least partly due to the reluctance of incumbent financial institutions and their regulators to kill off existing functions that a blockchain would make redundant; they instead designed cumbersome hybrid distributed-ledger models that sustained vested interests but were expensive and difficult to collectively implement.

Either way, a blockchain back-office fix for traditional finance isn’t coming any time soon – whether because of internal politics or the limitation of the technology.

Shining A Light

A more important question is why we even tolerate a system that’s so vulnerable to those back-end markets’ problems at all. The only reason central banks ever intervene to support interbank credit markets is because society’s means of payment depends on avoiding cash shortfalls and maintaining confidence in fractional-reserve banking.

If banks don’t have enough cash to meet short-term creditor calls, they would suffer runs on their deposits, companies wouldn’t make payroll, tenants would have to skip rent, ATMs would run out of banknotes, etc. The economy would seize up. The worst of it is that, because of this ever-present threat, banks hold our political system to ransom, knowing that they can always rely bailouts: the too-big-to-fail problem.

But what if banks just stuck to longer-term lending? What if there were no checking accounts or debit/credit cards, and we simply exchanged value with each other via cash or digital currencies that we hold ourselves?

If people used bitcoin, or fiat-backed stablecoins or central bank digital currencies to exchange value instead of the IOUs of an inherently fragile fractional reserve banking system, institutional cash shortages simply wouldn’t matter as much. Banks’ biggest creditors might take a hit against their risk-adjusted positions and their stock prices would fall, but the rest of us, including the Fed, could ignore the problem.

As the journalist and commentator Heidi Moore astutely observed in a tweetstorm last week, the reason the repo market tumult is so worrying is because it speaks directly to the core problem of trust in the banking system.

If nothing else, this is where blockchain technology provides a valuable lens with which to assess the current stress in the financial system. It helps us think about how the trust problem creates vulnerabilities, power imbalances and systemic risks and how we might design a system that’s better able to resolve it.

BTC And Quantitative Easing: What’s The Correlation To Crypto?

In 2018, the executive on the board for the European Central Bank (ECB) declared Bitcoin, “the evil spawn of the financial crisis” — referring, of course, to the economic disaster 10 years prior. Interestingly, also born from the ashes of the mortgage crisis was the United States government’s adoption and unabated use of quantitative easing (QE).

However, according to some, there’s more of a connection between Bitcoin (BTC) and the government’s use of QE than just their origins. A recent tweet from BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes highlighted this supposed correlation:

“QE4eva is coming. Once the Fed gets religion again, get ready for #bitcoin $20,000.”

Nodding to the Federal Reserve’s latest decision to pump the economy with billions of dollars, Hayes brazenly suggests a relationship between a growth in Bitcoin’s price and an increase in QE. But is this idea entirely out of the realms of possibility?

A Bailout For Banks

At the start of last week, banks all over the U.S. ran out of cash, as interest rates in the overnight market — a platform reserved for interbank lending — shot up to 10%. forcing the Fed to act. On Tuesday, $53 billion was mainlined into the financial sector in order to quell short-term interest rates. Known as an “overnight repo operation,” the Fed spent $40.8 billion on treasuries, $11.7 billion on mortgage-back securities and a further $600 million on agency bonds, all in an attempt to lessen borrowing costs from the proverbial line in the sand.

This line was drawn back in July, when the Fed set a renewed target range for interest rates of 2% to 2.5%. Come Wednesday, and with overnight lending rates still sky-high, this target was redrawn to a range of 1.75% to 2%, resulting in another $75 billion siphoned from the Fed’s coffers.

However, it didn’t stop there. On Thursday, with rates citing a spike of approximately five times the acceptable benchmark, the Fed released a statement bracing the market for an additional $75 billion. Friday marked yet another $75 billion in capital injections.

In total, $278 billion funneled into the markets. Finally, the Fed did away with the daily charade and announced that further operations would continue regularly through to mid-October. Previously, sky-high repo rates declined following the injection of $278 billion.

Fed Chairman Jay Powell mostly brushed the repo operations off, suggesting that while they were integral to the smooth running of the market, they had no “implications for the economy or the stance of monetary policy.”

These repurchasing agreements, or repos, typically involve the overnight lending of government securities on the open market, with distributors selling to investors with the expectation of repurchasing the following day. While these generally take place between financial institutions, once in a while, the Fed will get involved — entering into agreements to regulate the monetary supply. This latest flurry of investment marks the first time in over a decade that the Fed has intervened with a repo agreement, with the last being the 2008 global financial crisis.

The Goldilocks Paradigm

It’s perhaps important to make a distinction between the Fed’s recent repo agreements and QE. Broadly speaking, while open-market operations are an inevitable step toward quantitative easing, these two policies differ significantly. To use a reasonably reductive explanation, within repo operations, the Fed uses reserves to buy government assets such as treasuries on the overnight lending market to influence interest rates.

Whereas under QE, the Fed “prints” money — or rather, generates it electronically — and uses it to purchase securities with the direct intent and consequence of expanding the monetary supply.

QE is typically used as a last resort. For the Fed, this last resort comes when it fails in its mandate to keep interest rates in their designated sweet spot — thus, we have the principle of a goldilocks economy. If interest rates climb too high, pricing people out, a recession can occur; too low, and there’s a risk of excessive economic growth, inflation and subsequent currency devaluation.

Currently, the pressure from rising lending rates is forcing the Fed into a corner by which it needs to reduce its target to maintain an equilibrium. However, with four consecutive days of repo transactions last week, and a new pledge to continue buying government assets, it looks like quantitative easing could be next on the agenda.

Can Quantitative Easing Act As Momentum For Bitcoin?

While the objective of QE is to revitalize the economy via low rates, providing a new incentive for borrowing and investing, it can also drive investors to diversify more risk into their portfolios, as they look to maintain the same yield. Speaking to Cointelegraph, Alex Krüger, a cryptocurrency trader and economist, explained what this expanding desire for risk may entail for Bitcoin:

“QE would push longer interest rates lower and thus push some investors out the risk curve, i.e., seeking riskier investments to achieve desired returns. One can theorize some of that money would end in Bitcoin, adding upward pressure to prices.”

Additionally, this notion of excessive risk-taking during quantitative easing was highlighted in a report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which said that “prolonged monetary ease may also encourage excessive financial risk-taking, in the form of increased portfolio allocations to riskier assets.” Thanks to its widespread stigma as a “risk-on” asset, Bitcoin could, in theory, reap some of the benefits afforded by increased demand for more perilous investments.

A modest supplement of the previous theory is established from the increase in monetary supply. Simply put, the more fiat funneled into the financial system, the more disposable capital there is for investments. Mati Greenspan, eToro’s senior market analyst, noted this while talking to Cointelgraph, suggesting that, “Some of that money will likely be channeled into Bitcoin.”

So, Why Bitcoin? The Nascent Protocol Is Known As The Antithesis Of The Financial System.

It was born literally to oppose and subvert traditional banking. With such an option at their disposal, and with growing concerns of a systemic collapse, it’s not inconceivable that people are turning to Bitcoin for capital refuge.

Furthermore, a somewhat darker theory relates to the relationship between QE and currency devaluation. As interest rates decrease and the monetary supply rises, domestic currency inflates and loses value. Interestingly, for some — especially during a trade war — a weaker currency is a welcome byproduct of QE due to exports becoming cheaper and more competitive on a global scale. For Bitcoin believers, it is just another sign of the imminent collapse of the financial system.

With the defacto world reserve currency on its last legs, Bitcoin’s purported role as a macro hedge is becoming more of a reality. Broadcaster, Bitcoin bull and fiat doomsayer Max Keiser is one such propagator of this theory. In a conversation with Cointelgraph, Kieser suggested that much of Bitcoin’s value is based on the denigration of the financial industry:

“QE (debt-monetization) is designed to keep zombie banks alive. Bitcoin was introduced to battle zombie banks and QE and the price has exploded higher in response to the increase in global reliance on the accounting fraud and chicanery of QE. There is no end to QE.

There is no scenario other than all fiat everywhere crashes to zero (as all fiat has done over 300 years). And there is no top to the Bitcoin price. $1 million and above is virtually a certainty at this point.”

Bitcoin: A Hedge Against Economic Uncertainty?

If a genuine connection between QE and Bitcoin’s price is to be seen, then a clear definition of BTC’s asset status needs to be made. Seemingly in accord with Kieser, economist and CEO of Global Macro Investor Raoul Pal has been especially vocal on this topic as of late.

In August, Pal delivered a tweetstorm, declaring a worldwide currency crisis and advocating for investment in Bitcoin, as it “trades like a call option on a new system.”

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Pal communicated that while Bitcoin may not be the best bet against macro risk, it will likely play a significant role in the event of a financial collapse:

“I view BTC as an option on the End Game to the current monetary system. No, it is not a good day to day macro hedge. It is a macro systemic risk hedge, however. That is very different. It does play a decent role in capital flight too in emerging markets.”

Wall Street veteran and Wyoming Blockchain Coalition President Caitlin Long similarly believes in Bitcoin’s budding utility as a hedge against economic instability. Within a recent article, Long lambasted the fragile nature of the financial system, referring to last week’s repo events as “a modern version of a bank run.” Nevertheless, Long maintains that it provided further confidence in Bitcoin:

“Bitcoin is not a debt-based system that periodically experiences bank run-like instability. In this regard, Bitcoin is an insurance policy against financial market instability. Bitcoin is no one’s IOU. It has no lender of last resort because it doesn’t need one.”

Krüger appeared to agree that Bitcoin is only a hedge against the additional, tail risk of central bankers and/or governments losing control. However, Krüger added the caveat that the Fed’s execution of QE “would not represent losing control.”

This is an important distinction to make when weighing up any correlation between QE and Bitcoin’s price action. On this point, Krüger remarked that there had been no precedent that shows any such relationship, yet:

“There is no evidence BTC has benefited from prior QE rounds. However, the more engrained with traditional markets Bitcoin becomes, the higher the impact one should expect. The QE impact should be significant if by then BTC is already behaving from a macro standpoint as digital gold, which is not yet the case.”

Krüger’s assertion seems to hold some merit. During Bitcoin’s short history, QE has had very little impact. However, it could be argued that price discovery during these periods was still underway. As Krüger notes, this correlation could strengthen as Bitcoin matures.

The Fed’s balance sheet tends to increase in conjunction with various QE rounds, as it did from 2008 to 2014, but it also seems to share very little correlation to any increases in Bitcoin’s price.

How Likely Is QE, Anyway?

While the ongoing repo agreements hint to some further measures to avoid inflation, it isn’t exactly concrete proof that QE will be initiated in its traditional sense. However, if the Fed continues to follow the global monetary policy of other sluggish economies, it will perhaps be an inevitability.

In September 2019, the ECB announced a fresh bout of economic stimulus, reintroducing an aggressive phase of quantitative easing to the tune of 20 billion euros per month, starting in November.

The ECB also slashed interest rates further into the negative, from -0.4% to -0.5%, much to the anguish of President Donald Trump, whose competitive nature came out in full swing. In a trademark Twitter tirade, he remarked.

“European Central Bank, acting quickly, Cuts Rates 10 Basis Points. They are trying, and succeeding, in depreciating the Euro against the VERY strong Dollar, hurting U.S. exports… And the Fed sits, and sits, and sits. They get paid to borrow money, while we are paying interest!”

Trump’s pressure on the Fed to cut interest rates to the negative gives a fair bit of credence to the possibility of the U.S. entering its own QE phase. On this point, Greenspan remained unperturbed, suggesting that the ongoing repo operations were enough to sustain the economy for now:

“The ECB has rekindled their QE program. For the moment, the Fed in the United States is content to ease policy through interest rate manipulation.”

Similarly, Krüger noted that U.S. interest rates still had room to breathe before Federal Reserve Chairman Powell considered implementing QE:

“Powell has explicitly said the Fed would consider using QE again if ‘we were to find ourselves at some future date again at the effective lower bound — again, not something we are expecting.’ Rates are at the moment far from the effective lower bound (i.e. 0%).”

Nevertheless, Kruger included the caveat that QE might be adopted “during Trump’s 2nd term.” Indeed, with the ongoing trade war between China and the U.S., it isn’t likely that Trump will give up exerting his dovish will on the Fed. In recent months, a quasi-currency war has threatened to develop between the two nations. In June, the first rate cut in Bitcoin’s nascent history was imposed by the Fed, with Powell alluding to the escalating U.S.–China trade war.

Come early August, China combatted a fresh batch of U.S. tariffs by devaluing its own currency. To counter the move, Trump pressured the Fed to lower interest rates once again, to which it eventually acquiesced last week. Ruminating on this to Cointelgraph, Naeem Aslam, market analyst for a trading platform ThinkMarkets, suggested that QE may advance if the trade war lingers:

“I think if the trade war continues, then the Fed will be left with no other option but to continue the path of rate cuts. What matters the most is the pace and the aggressiveness of the Fed through which they cut the interest rates.”

Thanks to the possibility of a looming currency war and the subsequent economic depression that may bring, a Reuters poll relays that the median probability of a U.S. recession in the next two years stands at 45%. With such high estimations of a rising recession, it seems almost undoubtedly that QE will continue and proliferate.

As for a consensus on Bitcoin’s potential reaction to quantitative easing, it’s perhaps too early to tell. While numerous outcomes such as a systemic breakdown, an escalation between China and the U.S., or even something as simple as an increased risk appetite could all lead Bitcoin higher, there has been no real precedent to allude that it will.

Nonetheless, a predilection toward using Bitcoin as a safe haven is seemingly on the rise. And if sentimentality is anything to go by, the market dictates at least some movement from Bitcoin following economic strain in the future.

Big Banks Loom Over Fed Repo Efforts

Concentration of market activity there can drive borrowing costs higher for smaller firms.

The dominance of big firms trading in the overnight market for cash loans is hampering Federal Reserve efforts to calm short-term funding markets.

Activity in the market for repurchase agreements, or repos, where banks and investors seek more than a trillion dollars in cash loans every day, has increasingly concentrated at large banks. When those banks hoard reserves, it can drive borrowing costs higher for smaller firms, according to a study by Fed economists published last year. The five largest banks hold more than 90% of the supply of total reserves and a more even distribution would help cushion against such shocks, the study found.

That is one challenge confronting Fed officials as they try to get funds flowing through the financial system following last week’s surge in overnight interest rates, which climbed as high as 10%. As the Fed has increased lending in the repo market, it is reliant on a small group of bond dealers to recirculate that money through the financial system, increasing opportunities for channels to get clogged.

Under the current market structure, “concentration levels among the biggest banks are only going to get more concentrated,” said James Tabacchi, president of South Street Securities, a brokerage specializing in repos.

The Fed works with a group of 24 banks or securities dealers known as primary dealers, such as JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. They are exclusively responsible for trading with the central bank when it wants to engage in market activities, ranging from buying or selling bonds to adding cash to the financial system. Those dealers then work as intermediaries between the Fed and other investors and financial institutions.

When the Fed lends money through the repo market, officials are acting in the expectation that what they lend will be recirculated by the primary dealers. However, the Fed faces the risk that those dealers may hold on to funds to meet their own needs, analysts said.

One risk is that the larger banks could opt to lend less cash than usual at the end of the quarter to smaller dealers. At the end of last year, those larger banks cut back on lending, sending repo rates soaring above 6%. The large banks may have held on to cash then because regulators typically examine their balance sheets at the ends of fiscal quarters to ensure they are following rules that safeguard the banking system.

Such decisions can make borrowing in the repo market difficult for smaller dealers, said Seth Carpenter, chief U.S. economist at UBS Group AG and a former official at the Fed and the Treasury Department.

“This question about segmentation in the market and what happens at quarter-end is important,” Mr. Carpenter said.

The Fed has twice announced increases to its cash loans in the repo market after demand from banks repeatedly exceeded the funds made available. Demand has been strongest for recent offerings of two-week loans that are intended to ensure that banks have cash available heading into the end of the quarter, which is a time when they frequently try to hold on to reserves.

On Thursday, banks asked for $72.75 billion in 14-day cash loans, $12.75 billion more than the amount offered by the Fed. In a second separate operation, banks asked for $50.1 billion in overnight reserves, all of which the Fed accepted.

“There’s still a very big demand for cash that may not be satisfied by the current operations,” said Gennadiy Goldberg, a fixed-income strategist at TD Securities.

At the same time, the repo desks at some smaller primary dealers have languished in recent years as those lenders invested resources in more lucrative businesses, such as corporate bonds. Others kept idle money at the Fed, collecting the risk-free rate paid by the central bank for such funds, known as interest on excess reserves.

Another issue is a decline in the number of smaller firms that borrow from the larger dealers through the repo market, distributing the money more widely. That includes CRT Group LLC, which closed in 2017; KGS-Alpha Capital Markets L.P., which was acquired last year by BMO Capital Markets; and the repo operations of Rosenthal Collins Group LLC, which were shuttered in February after the company was bought by Marex Spectron, a commodities brokerage.

Smaller firms also tend to have less cash on hand and fewer ways to quickly raise it than their bigger peers, which puts them at greater risk to the extent they have used cash borrowed in the repo market to pay for the securities on their books, repo market participants said.

Concentration in the repo market is likely to persist, some analysts said. Big primary dealers have structural advantages, including more lines of credit connecting them with large regional banks, and trading relationships with money market mutual funds, such as Vanguard Group and T. Rowe Price which roll billions of dollars each day into the repo market. That gives bigger banks more sources to tap when they seek funding, according to current and former repo traders and industry observers.

Last week the financial system ran out of cash. It was a modern version of a bank run, and it’s not over yet. The Real Story Of The Repo Market Meltdown, And What It Means For Bitcoin

Stepping back, it reveals two big things about financial markets: first, US Treasuries are not truly “risk-free” assets, as most consider them to be, and second, big banks are significantly undercapitalized. The event doesn’t mean another financial meltdown is necessarily imminent—just that the risk of one is heightened—since the brush fire can be doused either by the Fed, or by the banks raising more equity capital. However, it provides a “teachable moment” regarding systemic fragility and anti-fragility.

Caitlin Long: Bitcoin/Blockchain, Wyoming Blockchain Task Force, 22-year Wall Street Veteran.

What’s Happening, In Plain English?

Somebody—probably a big bank—needs cash so badly that it has been willing to pay a shockingly high cost to obtain it. That’s the layman’s explanation of what’s happening. Interest rates have betrayed common sense—interest rates in the repo market should be lower than rates in unsecured markets, for example, because repos are secured by assets and thus supposedly lower-risk. But repo rates spiked way above unsecured lending rates last week, even for “risk-free” collateral such as US Treasuries.

But US Treasuries are not risk-free. Far from it. (By this, I’m not referring to the US potentially defaulting on its debt obligations. Rather, I’m referring to the practice in the repo market that allows more people to believe they own US Treasuries than actually do. It’s called “rehypothecation.”)

Why was someone willing to borrow cash at a 10% interest rate last Tuesday, in exchange for pledging US Treasury collateral that yields only 2% or less? That trade lost someone a whopping 8% (annualized) overnight, but presumably the trade allowed the bank to stay in business for another day. As risk premiums go, 8% is shockingly high—for a supposedly risk-free asset!

On the flip side, the better question is why banks weren’t willing to lend against “risk-free” collateral for an 8% “risk-free” gain? Banks are supposedly healthy and flush with cash, right? So why aren’t banks falling over themselves to rake in such easy, “risk-free” profits?

hockingly, the Fed admitted to asking itself this same question, as revealed in an extraordinary interview on Friday with New York Fed President John Williams in the Financial Times. The Fed has a theory about why. Many analysts do too. But almost no one is talking about the elephant in the room.

The Elephant In The Room

For every US Treasury security outstanding, roughly three parties believe they own it. That’s right. Multiple parties report that they own the very same asset, when only one of them truly does. To wit, the IMF has estimated that the same collateral was reused 2.2 times in 2018, which means both the original owner plus 2.2 subsequent re-users believe they own the same collateral (often a US Treasury security).

This is why US Treasuries aren’t risk-free—they’re the most rehypothecated asset in financial markets, and the big banks know this. Auditors can’t catch this because GAAP accounting standards obfuscate it, as I’ll explain later.

What it all means is that, while each bank’s financial statements show the bank is solvent, the financial system as a whole isn’t. And no one really knows how much double-, triple-, quadruple-, etc. counting of US Treasuries takes place. US Treasuries are the core asset used by every financial institution to satisfy its capital and liquidity requirements—which means that no one really knows how big the hole is at a system-wide level.

This is the real reason why the repo market periodically seizes up. It’s akin to musical chairs—no one knows how many players will be without a chair until the music stops. Every player knows there aren’t enough chairs. Everyone knows someone will eventually lose.

Financial regulators can’t publicly admit to this, but big banks know it’s true—and that’s why they hunker down (and stop lending) when they sense one of their kin is in trouble. They recognize that what appears to be an 8% risk-free arbitrage is anything but risk-free.

Most financial regulators baffle us with jargon when they discuss this issue, making it barely intelligible to regular folks (cloaking it in such terms as “clogged transmission mechanisms,” “length of collateral chains”). The closest I’ve heard a financial regulator speak publicly of this is former CFTC Chairman Chris Giancarlo, to his credit, when he answered a question after a 2016 speech:

“At the heart of the financial crisis, perhaps the most critical element was the lack of visibility into the counterparty credit exposure of one major financial institution to another. Probably the most glaring omission that needed to be addressed was that lack of visibility, and here we are in 2016 and we still don’t have it.”

This is why the FT’s interview with Williams was so extraordinary. It’s as close as a regulator will come to admitting the reality that the system doesn’t work the way most of us think it does and that the Fed may not even understand critical things about it. Specifically, the Fed’s focus on the fed funds market is misplaced because the real action is in the much bigger, much more global repo market; the Fed shouldn’t have allowed America’s big banks to pay dividends or buy back stock when they’re so capital-constrained that they can’t even pick up an 8% “risk-free” arbitrage; the Fed’s proclamation that “the financial system remains resilient,” when it released the results of the most recent bank stress tests in June 2019, strains credulity; a staggering amount of US dollar liabilities have been issued offshore in recent decades and the Fed not only doesn’t control them but can’t measure them with any degree of accuracy; and banks’ financial statements don’t accurately reflect their financial health.

No one really knows how solvent (insolvent?) the financial system is.

Auditors can’t help here, and the accounting profession bears some of the blame for this problem. In June 2014, FASB updated the US GAAP accounting rules for repos. Here’s what the books of three parties show when a transferee (Party A) sells pledged collateral to a third party (Party C):

* Party A Owns A Particular Us Treasury Bond, Showing An Asset Of $100.
* Party B Borrows It, Showing A Liability Of $100 ($100 Of Securities Sold, Not Yet Purchased).
* Party C Shows An Asset Of $100.

If you add up the positions of all parties, economically there’s no problem because the net of the two longs and one short position add up to $100. The problem arises when you aggregate the three US GAAP financial statements. Both Party A and Party C report that they own the same asset (!) The balance sheets balance because Party B records a liability, so auditors don’t catch the problem. When that same bond is reused again and again and again in similar transactions, the magnitude of double counting within the financial system builds in a manner that no one can accurately measure.

For years, IMF economist Dr. Manmohan Singh has done terrific work estimating it (see examples here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

Singh has been recommending for years that regulators’ financial stability assessments of big banks be adjusted to back out “pledged collateral, or the associated reuse of such assets.” Financial regulators should have followed his advice years ago!

What does this mean for markets in the short-term? No one knows, but I doubt this is “the big one.” Sure, the repo market is flashing red sirens. But the run on repo can be stalled in one of two ways: (1) banks raise new equity capital, or (2) the Fed injects more dollars into the system.

Yes, it’s true that a run in the repo market is serious, since the big banks are still overly reliant on it and one dropped ball by the Fed could quickly turn the brush fire into an inferno. But, as usual, the Fed will almost certainly do what it always does—stem the run by injecting cash into the system in various ways, thereby socializing losses among all US dollar holders.

A Teachable Moment

If this topic makes you uncomfortable, it should. It made me uncomfortable when I first realized all of this, which for me happened during the financial crisis while I was working on Wall Street and took a deep dive into why the crisis was happening. The financial system is fragile. It’s unstable. It always has been. What started in the repo market last week isn’t new—it’s actually the fourth such episode since 2008.

Here I distinguish between price volatility and systemic volatility.

Bitcoin’s price is highly volatile, but as a system it is more stable. In stark contrast to the traditional financial system, Bitcoin is not a debt-based system that periodically experiences bank run-like instability.

In this regard, Bitcoin is an insurance policy against financial market instability. Bitcoin is no one’s IOU. It has no lender of last resort because it doesn’t need one.

For me, Bitcoin is empowering because it provides a choice to opt out of the traditional financial system. In light of the traditional financial system’s instability, despite all of Bitcoin’s drawbacks, I find that a powerful concept.

Updated: 10-6-2019

Fed Confronts Balance-Sheet Decisions To Curb Money-Market Volatility

Central bank will need to clarify that its moves are aimed at smoothing market operations, not providing new stimulus.

The Federal Reserve fixed the recent dysfunction in an obscure but critical lending market. Now it has to decide how to prevent these problems from recurring.

Shortages of funds that banks were willing to lend on Sept. 16 and 17 led interest rates in very short-term lending markets to rise sharply. In response, the Fed injected billions of dollars of cash to pull rates down to their target range.

Fed officials discussed the issue at their policy meeting on Sept. 17 and 18, and minutes of that gathering—to be released Wednesday—will provide some details on their thinking.

Among the decisions they face: when and how to resume increasing the size of their asset portfolio—often referred to as the balance sheet—and whether to create new tools to reduce money market volatility.

The Fed also will have to clarify that such moves are aimed at smoothing out market operations, not providing new economic stimulus.

Fed policy makers set their benchmark federal-funds rate to influence a suite of short-term rates at which banks lend to each other overnight, including in the “repo” market for collateralized short-term loans. A sudden shortage of cash in this market cause repo rates to surge on Sept. 16 and 17, prompting the Fed intervention.

The repo market is an arcane but important part of the financial system. With $1 trillion in funding flowing through it every day, any disruptions—if allowed to fester—could influence the rates businesses and consumers pay and also drag on economic growth.

The Fed’s intervention in repo markets, which will continue at least through early November, were standard operating procedure before the 2008 crisis. But today they amount to a temporary Band-Aid, which is why officials must now settle on a permanent fix.

Some analysts say last month’s rupture shows how the Fed’s delays in finalizing nuts-and-bolts decisions that could have been made months or years ago—either because officials couldn’t reach agreement or didn’t feel urgency to do so—has now forced the central bank to play catch up.

At issue is some complex monetary plumbing. To boost growth after the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed bought bonds to push down long-term interest rates and drive up asset prices. These purchases flooded the banking sector with deposits held at the central bank, known as reserves.

Before the 2008 crisis, the Fed kept its balance sheet at less than $1 trillion. The size was dictated primarily by demand for the Fed’s liabilities, which include currency, reserves and the Treasury’s financing account. The Fed shifted the supply of reserves up and down in incremental amounts to adjust short-term rates.

The crisis changed everything. With the banking system awash with reserves, the Fed devised new tools to control interest rates. It started paying interest on these reserves directly to banks, raising or lowering the interest rate on reserves to change the interest rates banks charged each other.

Later, the Fed wanted to demonstrate that its crisis-era stimulus could be withdrawn and began shrinking the balance sheet two years ago. Officials stopped the process this past summer and are now holding its portfolio steady at $3.9 trillion, but that means any increases in nonreserve liabilities lead to a one-for-one decline in reserves.

The Fed now has to decide when to allow the balance sheet to start growing again to keep up with demand for the central bank’s liabilities. Officials knew that eventually, reserves would reach a level low enough that banks would charge more to lend to each other in overnight markets, but didn’t think they would hit that point this soon.

The Fed will study whether postcrisis financial rules or informal guidance from regulators changed banks’ behavior in a way that amplified recent market stress.

“Essentially, the Fed underestimated the system’s demand for liquidity and allowed its balance sheet to shrink too much,” said Roberto Perli, an analyst at Cornerstone Macro.

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said last month that officials would consider resuming balance sheet growth at their Oct. 29 and 30 meeting, but many market participants “are now hoping for something more audacious,” said Lou Crandall, chief economist at financial-research firm Wrightson ICAP.

Some current and former Fed officials think the easiest fix would be to build a “buffer” of reserves $150 billion or $250 billion above mid-September’s low watermark by buying Treasury securities.

“The way to address [reserve scarcity] is to start growing our reserves…and maybe increase [them] enough that we don’t have to do as many high-frequency interventions,” Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren said in an interview.

If Fed officials choose this option, they must also decide how fast to build up reserves and what mix of Treasury securities to buy. One way to limit the perception that such purchases represent new stimulus would be to buy shorter-term Treasury bills instead of the longer-dated notes and bonds the Fed bought after the 2008 crisis.

Officials believe holding long-term securities boosts the economy and financial markets by lowering long-term rates and driving investors into stocks and bonds. They think a portfolio weighted toward shorter-term securities provides less stimulus.

The Fed also could add new tools. Officials in June debated creating a so-called standing repo facility that would allow banks to exchange Treasurys for reserves without the stigma of emergency borrowing at the Fed’s discount window.

Officials would have to determine certain details, including which financial institutions would have access and what interest rates to charge. They don’t appear to be close to making any decisions.

The discussions about this tool “are in their infancy, and there is more work to be done,” said Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker in a speech last month.

Updated: 10-8-2019

Federal Reserve To Announce Measures To Increase Supply of Bank Reserves

The central bank is contemplating purchases of Treasurys to rebuild reserve buffer after recent funding market volatility.

The Federal Reserve will soon increase its purchases of short-term Treasury securities in order to avoid any recurrence of the unexpected strains experienced in money markets last month, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said on Tuesday.

Fed officials stopped shrinking the assets on its balance sheet in August but never said when they would allow the balance sheet to grow again. As a result, a crucial liability on the balance sheet—bank deposits held at the Fed, called reserves—have continued declining, and in recent weeks, stresses in very-short term funding markets suggested banks have grown reluctant to lend out of those reserves.

For months, officials have said they would someday allow reserves to grow again, which would require the Fed to increase its purchases of Treasury securities. But they hadn’t said when exactly they would take that step until Tuesday.

“That time is now upon us,” Mr. Powell said in a speech to the National Association for Business Economics in Denver.

Mr. Powell didn’t delve into specifics. “My colleagues and I will soon announce measures to add to the supply of reserves over time,” he said.

Reserves dropped to less than $1.4 trillion last month, from $2.8 trillion in 2014, when the Fed stopped buying assets, with most of the decline occurring over the last two years after the Fed pared its asset holdings by allowing some bonds to mature without replacing them.

Mr. Powell emphasized that the coming moves are aimed at maintaining a firm grip on very short-term lending rates—and not to provide new economic stimulus, as the Fed did between 2008 and 2014 by purchasing longer-dated Treasury and mortgage securities.

Rather than purchase longer-dated securities, Mr. Powell said officials are now contemplating buying shorter-dated Treasury bills in order to rebuild the level of reserves in the system.

“Neither the recent technical issues nor the purchases of Treasury bills we are contemplating to resolve them should materially affect the stance of monetary policy,” he said.

The Fed’s goal “is to provide an ample supply of reserves to ensure that control of the federal-funds rate and other short-term interest rates” doesn’t require regular market intervention by the central bank, Mr. Powell said.

Fed policy makers set their benchmark federal-funds rate to influence a suite of short-term rates at which banks lend to each other overnight, including in the “repo” market for collateralized short-term loans. A sudden shortage of cash in this market caused repo rates to surge on Sept. 16 and 17, prompting the Fed intervention.

The repo market is an arcane but important part of the financial system. With more than $1 trillion in funding flowing through it every day, any disruptions—if allowed to fester—could influence the rates businesses and consumers pay and also drag on economic growth.

The Fed’s daily interventions in repo markets, which will continue at least through early November, was standard operating procedure before the 2008 crisis. But today they amount to a temporary Band-Aid, which is why officials must now settle on a permanent fix.

Some current and former Fed officials think the easiest fix to recent funding market pressures would be to build a “buffer” of reserves $150 billion or $250 billion above mid-September’s low watermark by buying Treasury securities.

Market analysts applauded Mr. Powell’s announcement, which they said helped clarify ambiguity around the Fed’s mid- and long-range plans. “This was a helpful announcement today, allowing investors to focus on the actual rate decision/guidance provided in three weeks rather than mechanics,” said Jim Vogel, an interest-rate strategist at FTN Financial.

Mr. Powell provided fewer clues Tuesday about the central bank’s plans to provide additional interest rate cuts after lowering its benchmark federal-funds rate for a second time in September, to its current range between 1.75% and 2%.

He didn’t explicitly ratify or rebut recent market expectations of another quarter-percentage-point cut at its Oct. 29-30 meeting. The Fed’s next policy meeting is several weeks away “and we will be carefully monitoring incoming information,” Mr. Powell said. “We will be data dependent, assessing the outlook and risks to the outlook on a meeting-by-meeting basis.”

Economic data last week pointed to signs of a continued slowdown in the pace of job growth, but not a sharp downturn. The September jobs report showed a gain of 136,000 positions and unemployment falling to 3.5%. Mr. Powell said recent labor market data has been solid, with the slower pace of job gains still strong enough accommodate new workers who want jobs.

A recent spate of weak factory data and other signs of a slowdown have helped to fuel market expectations of another cut in October.

While the jobs and inflation picture for the U.S. economy has been favorable, Mr. Powell said global developments pose risks to this outlook, including from trade policy uncertainty and Britain’s impending departure from the European Union.

Mr. Powell said he believed the Fed’s recent rate cuts had provided support to the outlook, and he said the Fed would “act as appropriate” to sustain the current expansion.

New York Fed Adds $82.7 Billion To Financial System in Latest Repo Transaction

The Fed began offering repo loans last month after a shortage of available cash in the financial system led rates to climb.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York added $82.7 billion to the financial system Friday, using the market for repurchase agreements, or repo, to relieve funding pressure in money markets.

Banks asked for $21.15 billion in 6-day loans, all of which was accepted by the Fed, offering collateral in the form of Treasury and mortgage securities.

In a second separate operation, banks asked for $61.55 billion in overnight reserves, all of which the Fed accepted, also offering collateral in the form of Treasury and mortgage securities.

In the repo market, borrowers seeking cash offer lenders collateral in the form of safe securities—frequently Treasury bonds—in exchange for a short-term loan. The term of these loans can be as short as overnight.

When the Fed adds money to the financial system through the repo market, it is acting as a lender. In typical repo market transactions, lenders can include money-market mutual funds, banks or hedge funds that are seeking to earn a slightly higher rate of interest than what is available from holding very short-term government securities. The borrowers are often banks, securities firms or hedge funds that use the cash to finance positions in the market.

Banks and hedge funds borrow or lend depending on their needs and investment goals.

The Fed began offering repo loans last month after a shortage of available cash in the financial system led repo rates to climb as financial companies scrambled for overnight funding. The actions marked the first time since the financial crisis that the Fed had taken such actions.

Last week, the Fed said it would extend its scheduled repo lending through Nov. 4. It said it would continue to offer overnight repos, which are meant to relieve funding pressure in money markets, for an aggregate amount of at least $75 billion each night through Nov. 4.

The Fed said it would extend its two-week repo loans as well. It plans to offer at least $45 billion between Oct. 8 and Oct. 11. After that, the amount available will drop to $35 billion through Oct. 29.

Fed Will Purchase Treasury Bills At Least Into Second Quarter of 2020

Central bank seeks to avoid a recurrence of the unexpected strains experienced in money markets last month.

The Federal Reserve will begin buying Treasury bills on Tuesday to boost its balance sheet and avoid a recurrence of the unexpected strains experienced in money markets last month, the central bank said.

The Fed will begin initial purchases of $60 billion in Treasurys over the month beginning next Tuesday. The central bank said it would continue purchases of Treasury bills of unspecified amounts into the second quarter of 2020.

The Fed’s rate-setting committee met by videoconference last Friday, Oct. 4, to discuss recent developments in money markets. It voted unanimously on the plans to purchase Treasury bills to grow its balance sheet.

The central bank said the actions announced Friday were “purely technical measures to support the effective implementation” of the committee’s policy setting “and do not represent a change in the stance of monetary policy.”

The Federal Open Market Committee last agreed on a policy decision in between its eight regularly scheduled annual meetings in May 2010, when it reopened a lending program with foreign central banks to alleviate funding pressures growing out of Europe’s fiscal crisis.

Fed officials stopped shrinking the assets on their balance sheet in August but never said when they would allow them to grow again. As a result, a crucial liability on the balance sheet—bank deposits held at the Fed, called reserves—has continued declining.

Stresses in very-short-term funding markets last month suggested banks have grown reluctant to lend those reserves. Officials hadn’t said until Tuesday when they would allow reserves to grow again to avoid further scarcity issues from roiling funding markets.

“That time is now upon us,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said in a speech Tuesday in Denver.

The Fed has been purchasing up to $20 billion of a range of Treasury securities since August to replace maturing mortgage securities. The $60 billion of monthly bill purchases announced Friday will be added to those existing purchases.

Reserves dropped to less than $1.4 trillion last month, from $2.8 trillion in 2014, when the Fed stopped buying assets. Most of the decline occurred over the past two years after the Fed pared its asset holdings by allowing some bonds to mature without replacing them.

The goal will be to rebuild the level of reserves in the system to levels that prevailed in early September, the central bank said. Reserves stood at $1.5 trillion at that time.

The Fed said Friday it will adjust the timing and amounts of Treasury purchases and other temporary funding operations “as necessary to maintain an ample supply of reserve balances over time and based on money market conditions.”

Mr. Powell emphasized that the moves are aimed at maintaining a firm grip on very-short-term lending rates—and not to provide economic stimulus, as the Fed did between 2008 and 2014 by purchasing longer-dated Treasury and mortgage securities in successive campaigns sometimes referred to as quantitative easing, or QE.

“This is not QE,” Mr. Powell said Tuesday. “In no sense is this QE.”

Rather than purchase longer-dated securities, officials will instead buy shorter-dated Treasury bills. Officials believe holding long-term securities boosts the economy and financial markets by lowering long-term rates and driving investors into stocks and bonds. They think a portfolio weighted toward shorter-term securities provides less or no stimulus.

The Fed’s balance sheet has swelled to nearly $4 trillion from $3.8 trillion over the past month because the New York Fed has been conducting temporary overnight and short-term lending operations to restore liquidity to a key very-short-term funding market.

The Fed also said Friday it will continue to conduct those short-term and overnight repurchase agreement operations, known as repos, at least through January of next year. It will initially offer at least $35 billion of term repo operations, generally twice a week. Overnight repo operations will take place daily, initially in an offering amount of at least $75 billion per operation, the Fed said.

Updated: 10-17-2019

The Fed Is Buying Treasurys Again. Just Don’t Call It Quantitative Easing

Central bank is buying assets for sole purpose of fine-tuning liability side of its balance sheet.

The Federal Reserve began buying short-term Treasury debt Tuesday at an initial pace of $60 billion a month, but officials say these purchases are nothing like the bond-buying stimulus campaigns unleashed by the central bank between 2008 and 2014 to support the economy.

Here are answers to six commonly asked questions about what is happening:

Q: What is the Fed doing?

The Fed began buying Treasury bills on Oct. 15 at an initial pace of $60 billion a month because officials concluded that last month’s dysfunction in very-short-term lending markets may have resulted from allowing its $4 trillion portfolio to shrink too much.

Q: What happened in money markets last month?

Large payments of corporate taxes and Treasury auction settlements on Sept. 16 resulted in a large transfer of cash from banks to the government. A mismatch in the demand and supply for cash put pressure on a critical funding market in which banks lend to each other overnight through repurchase agreements, or “repo.”

This year, repo rates usually have been no more than a 10th of a percentage point above the midpoint of the benchmark federal-funds rate, or around 2.2% in August and early September. Repo rates rose to 5% on Sept. 16.

Pressure intensified when Wall Street firms’ repo desks began rolling over loans early Sept. 17, with the repo rate rising as high as 10%. Even then banks refused to lend, passing up big profits to hold on to their cash.

The dysfunction led the Fed’s benchmark federal-funds rate to rise to 2.3%—above its then-target range of between 2% and 2.25%. This hadn’t happened since the central bank began setting a range during the 2008 crisis.

The Fed began injecting cash into money markets on Sept. 17 to pull down interest rates, and it has conducted overnight lending operations every business day since then to keep markets functioning smoothly.

Q: Even if the Fed restored order, did the central bank play any role in contributing to this volatility?

Yes, according to some Fed officials and outside observers. To understand how, it helps to review changes in the central bank’s asset portfolio, sometimes called a balance sheet, over the past two years.

Between 2008 and 2014, the Fed dramatically expanded its portfolio to stimulate the economy. In 2017, central bank officials began shrinking their holdings by allowing some Treasury and mortgage securities to mature without replacing them.

When private investors buy bonds, they use cash, borrow funds or sell assets to raise money to fund those purchases. The Fed is different. It doesn’t have to do any of that because it can electronically credit money to the bank accounts of bond dealers that sell mortgage and Treasury securities. The Fed gets the bonds, and the sellers’ bank account increases by the same amount as the bonds’ value. Banks keep deposits at the Fed, known as reserves, and when the Fed buys bonds from banks, their reserves rise by an equal amount.

When the Fed started shrinking its balance sheet in 2017, it put the process in reverse. As the Fed’s holdings of Treasury bonds matured, balances in the Treasury’s general account at the Fed declined by the same amount; when the Treasury issued a new security to private investors to replace the maturing one, banks fund those purchases by reducing their reserves. Reserves peaked at $2.8 trillion in 2014 and had fallen to less than $1.4 trillion by mid-September.

Everyone knew there would come a time when reserves would grow scarce enough that banks might charge more to lend in overnight money markets, but experts inside and outside the Fed weren’t quite sure where that level was. Since the 2008 financial crisis, banks’ demand for reserves is much higher than it used to be because of changes in financial regulation and market structure.

Some Fed officials thought reserves wouldn’t grow scarce until they fell to less than $1.2 trillion based on surveys they had been conducting over the past year. But the repo market volatility from Sept. 16 to 17 suggested the Fed may have misjudged demand for reserves and allowed them to fall too low.

Q: How does the Fed’s purchases of Treasury securities help fix the problem?

If Fed officials concluded that they drained too many reserves from the system, a permanent fix would be to add reserves to the system. Buying Treasury bonds will create the reserves the Fed now thinks are needed to implement its policy decisions.

Q: How many securities will the Fed need to buy?

It depends on how big a “buffer” of extra reserves the Fed wants to maintain. The Fed has said its purchases of short-term Treasury bills will continue into the second quarter of next year, though it hasn’t committed to buying at a $60-billion-a-month pace beyond the first month of purchases.

Fed officials have said they want to return reserves to at least a level that prevailed in early September, when they were at nearly $1.5 trillion. If not for the Fed’s current repo market intervention, reserves would be at around $1.35 trillion.

Without the new purchases, reserves would decline even lower because other liabilities on the Fed’s balance sheet are growing. These liabilities include currency in circulation, the Treasury’s general account and certain services the Fed offers to foreign central banks.

For example, the Treasury is replenishing its general account after drawing it down this summer when it was using emergency measures to remain below the debt limit. Growth in currency and the Treasury’s general account could reduce reserves by another $150 billion this year.

Even though the Fed is likely to taper its purchases of Treasury bills in 2020, it will need to continue buying smaller amounts of Treasurys—likely no more than $15 billion a month—simply to keep up with currency growth.

Q: The Fed bought bonds to stimulate the economy between 2008 and 2014. Isn’t this the same thing?

Not according to the Fed. The central bank has taken pains to emphasize that these purchases don’t represent a return to what is known as quantitative easing, or QE.

Make no mistake: the Fed is buying a lot of securities—more than most analysts who closely monitor bond markets anticipated. In addition to $60 billion in Treasury bills, the Fed is buying up to $20 billion every month in a wider range of Treasury securities to replace maturing mortgage securities. By way of comparison, the Fed bought $85 billion a month in Treasury and mortgage securities between December 2012 and October 2014 in its largest and final round of quantitative easing.

There are three ways in which these purchases are different from QE.

First, QE was designed to inject more liquidity into the banking system than was needed to spur more risk-taking and boost growth. The Fed isn’t doing that this time. Instead, it is buying assets for the sole purpose of fine-tuning the liability side of its balance sheet.

Second, Fed officials believed QE was effective because the central bank bought long-term securities, lowering long-term rates and driving investors into stocks and bonds. The Fed’s latest purchases are concentrated in short-term bills that officials believe provide much less stimulus.

Third, QE had potentially powerful effects by telling investors about the Fed’s broader intentions to stimulate the economy, including by keeping rates lower for longer than might otherwise have been the case. The Fed isn’t doing that this time and instead has gone out of its way to say the opposite—that its latest purchases are technical measures designed to have “no material implications for the stance of monetary policy,” according to a primer the Fed published on Friday.

“This is not QE,” said Fed Chairman Jerome Powell last week. “In no sense is this QE.”

Updated: 10-21-2019

The Fed Just Printed More Money Than Bitcoin’s Entire Market Cap

Bitcoin (BTC) proponents are voicing fresh alarm after the United States Federal Reserve printed more than its entire market cap in new money this month.

Fed Balance Sheet Approaches $4T

As noted by cryptocurrency social media pundit Dennis Parker on Oct. 21, since mid-September, the Fed has injected $210 billion into the economy.

Part of its newly-revitalized quantitative easing (QE) strategy, the move dwarfs the total market cap of Bitcoin, which stands at $148 billion.

QE refers to the buying up of government bonds in order to provide economic stimulus. The Fed’s balance sheet, Parker notes, jumped from $3.77 trillion last month to $3.97 trillion. It had previously been higher, while the Fed’s own projections call for a balance sheet worth $4.7 trillion by 2025.

World “Sleepwalking” Into The Next Financial Crisis

For holders of assets that cannot have their supply inflated, such as gold and Bitcoin, money printing has regularly sparked calls to decrease reliance on fiat currency.

Parker’s suggestion that investors should buy BTC now came amid warnings from even the fiat establishment itself about the ailing health of the banking system.

In a speech at the International Monetary Fund’s general meeting last week, former Bank of England governor Mervyn King told attendees the world was “sleepwalking” into a financial crisis even worse than that of 2008.

“By sticking to the new orthodoxy of monetary policy and pretending that we have made the banking system safe, we are sleepwalking towards that crisis,” he summarized.

The concept that interventionist economic practices on the part of governments and central banks leads to financial destruction forms one of the central tenets of Saifedean Ammous’ “The Bitcoin Standard.”

Released in March 2018, the book focuses on Bitcoin as it compares to fiat currency and commodities such as gold.

As Cointelegraph noted, at ten years old, Bitcoin has now lasted 40% of the average fiat currency’s lifespan.

Updated: 10-24-2019

Fed Boosts Amount of Liquidity Offered to Financial System

Strong demand for the offerings is seen from eligible banks.

The Fed’s expanded offerings of liquidity to the financial system saw strong demand Thursday from eligible banks.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York intervened twice Thursday morning with what is called an overnight repurchase-agreement operation and via a 14-day repo operation. The New York Fed had said Wednesday it was raising its minimum offerings for overnight repos to $120 billion from a minimum of $75 billion, with the next two-term repo operation increased to $45 billion from a minimum of $35 billion.

The Thursday term repo saw dealers submit $62.15 billion in securities and the Fed take in $45 billion in Treasurys, agency and mortgage securities. The overnight operation was also well bid, with dealers offering and the Fed taking $89.154 billion in securities. The Thursday overnight repo operation was much bigger than the one-day operation Wednesday, where the Fed added $49.845 billion in one-day liquidity.

Fed repo interventions take in Treasury and mortgage securities from eligible banks in what is effectively a loan of central bank cash, collateralized by dealer-owned bonds. The bill purchases permanently add reserves to the financial system and are seen as a more-enduring fix for potential market volatility.

The expansion of temporary liquidity comes as the Fed is about to meet in a policy gathering next week that is likely to result in a cut in short-term rates. It is also month’s end, when short-term rates often face pressure as banks and companies sort out their financial liquidity needs.

Updated: 11-15-2019

Some Investors Resolve To Ring In the New Year By Lending Cash

Demand for overnight cash loans isn’t subsiding nearly two months after the repo market disruption.

Some investors expect a new surge of volatility in short-term money markets at year-end and are preparing to take advantage, gathering cash to lend overnight in the market for repurchase agreements, or repos.

While periods of volatility are often difficult to forecast, these investors are making an educated guess. The cost of borrowing overnight using repo has spiked at the end of recent quarters and at the end of 2018, when a scarcity of available cash drove rates as high as 6%. Some analysts blamed the move on banks’ reluctance to add to their year-end repo positions by lending cash on Dec. 31.

Though the Federal Reserve has been lending billions of dollars each day in the repo market, some analysts and bankers are concerned that the central bank’s method for providing funds limits the benefits of those loans, opening the door to volatility. The Fed works through a group of 24 big banks, known as primary dealers, that function as the central bank’s exclusive counterparties when trading in financial markets. That network could limit the effectiveness of the Fed’s repo programs if the primary dealers hold the cash rather than lend it out to other banks.

For those who lend in the repo market, such as money-market funds and other investors with available cash, that scenario could present an opportunity.

Jeffery Elswick, director of fixed income at Frost Investment Advisors, said he benefited from having an unusually large amount of cash in September available to lend in the market. That experience drove him to plan for another year-end event, even though he acknowledges that the Fed could ramp up its lending programs enough to minimize any spikes.

Mr. Elswick typically invests the firm’s cash in assets commonly found in money-market accounts such as Treasury bills and repo contracts. In September he had about $150 million in cash, which he was able to lend in the repo market. He said he plans to have as much as $200 million available at year-end.

“When rates were spiking out we were going, ‘Oh cool, we get to invest in repo at 6% today,’” he said.

One factor blamed for 2018 volatility around the new year: Banks’ regulatory capital requirements are determined by a snapshot of their holdings at the end of December. That recurring dynamic gives them an incentive to hold cash instead of lending because small changes in their books could tip them into a higher or lower capital-requirement tier for the next year.

Since the September spike in repo rates, the Fed has taken steps to ease conditions in cash markets. Officials began by injecting cash into money markets for the first time since the financial crisis, offering billions of overnight loans in the repo market. Then they added two-week repo loans, increased the amount of the offerings and committed to continue them well into next year. Fed officials also said they would buy $60 billion a month in Treasury bills.

Those steps, and the potential for others, could reduce the risk of another year-end spike, analysts and investors said.

Yet, almost two months after the September repo market disruption—and almost two months of measures to provide liquidity from the Fed—demand for cash isn’t subsiding. This month, banks and other borrowers are bidding for an average of about $74 billion in overnight cash loans from the Fed a day—about a 25% increase from last month. Central bank officials have said they plan to continue offering the loans into the second quarter.

“We are prepping for a pretty big spike in volatility and repo rates in the fourth quarter,” said Nick Maroutsos, co-head of global bonds at Janus Henderson. That means making sure the firm has cash available to lend if the supply becomes scarce again and rates climb.

Mr. Maroutsos said he plans to sell short-term assets to build up a larger cash position, which he intends to lend in the repo market and possibly use to purchase short-term company loans known as commercial paper.

Mr. Maroutsos is skeptical that the Fed’s overnight loans will calm markets at year-end. “The likelihood of a dollar squeeze is ultimately high,” he said.

Updated: 11-21-2019

Fed Adds $103.65 Billion To Financial System

Fed takes all the securities offered to it by eligible banks; interventions are aimed at ensuring the financial system has enough liquidity.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York added $103.65 billion in temporary liquidity to the financial system on Thursday.

The intervention came via overnight repurchase agreements, or repos, that totaled $74.45 billion, and via 14-day repos totaling $29.2 billion. The Fed took all the securities offered to it by eligible banks.

Fed repo interventions take in Treasury and mortgage securities from eligible banks in what is effectively a short-term loan of central-bank cash, collateralized by the securities.

The Fed also bought $7.501 billion in Treasury bills. Eligible banks submitted $34.3 billion in securities.

The Fed’s interventions are aimed at ensuring that the financial system has enough liquidity and that short-term borrowing rates remain well-behaved, with the central bank’s federal-fund rate staying within the 1.5%-to-1.75% target range. The effective fed-funds rate stood at 1.55% on Wednesday. The broad general collateral rate for repo trading stood at 1.53%, also for Wednesday.

The Fed has been intervening in markets in the current fashion since mid-September, when short-term rates unexpectedly shot up on a confluence of factors. Since then, money-market rates have been well behaved.

The Fed is using temporary operations to tamp down on any possible volatility, while purchasing Treasury bills to build up reserves in the banking system. It hopes that by buying Treasury bills it will be able to cut back on repo interventions at the start of next year.

Minutes that detailed the proceedings of two Fed meetings in October showed that officials were still working on a more enduring solution to ensure markets have enough liquidity to prevent unwanted swings in short-term rate markets.

Central-bank staffers laid out two options for officials to follow. One entails pressing forward with regular, modest-sized temporary repo operations for well into the future. The other sees the Fed launching what most refer to as a standing repo facility that would allow eligible banks to quickly hand Treasurys to the Fed in exchange for money, in a tool that is designed to cap short-term rate movements. The meeting minutes didn’t show officials coming to any decisions.

The meeting minutes also showed that in an Oct. 4 videoconference held by Fed officials, most officials supported an immediate announcement of Treasury bill purchases and didn’t want to wait until the formal Oct. 29-30 Federal Open Market Committee meeting. They worried that if they delayed the news it would be harder to drive home the point that the bill purchases were an entirely technical effort to bolster reserves, with no monetary policy implications.

Updated: 11-28-2019

What The Fed Reserve’s Balance Sheet Expansion Means For Bitcoin

The U.S. Federal Reserve is again expanding its balance sheet and prominent experts believe that could bode well for bitcoin in the long run.

The U.S. central bank’s balance sheet includes a large number of distinct assets and liabilities. When interest rates begin to rise, the Fed pumps more money into the system by buying treasuries. The banks, therefore, have more cash available to lend and lower interest rates.

In October, the Fed’s assets grew by over $162 billion to register the biggest monthly rise since 2008.

Popular analyst @Rhythmtrader hinted this was a sign of impending turmoil, the kind bitcoin is supposed to be a haven from, in a Nov. 7 tweet.

Further, $270 billion has been reportedly added to the balance sheet since Sept. 11, which implies an average daily growth rate of $5.8 billion. As of Nov. 15, the Fed’s total assets were $4.04 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Fed Intervenes In Money Markets

The central bank again started buying treasuries after the money markets went haywire in September, pushing short-term rates as high as 10 percent, threatening to disrupt the overall lending system.

It’s worth noting that the Fed does not have the authority to enforce a particular federal funds rate and instead influences the money supply to keep rates in the target range, currently 1.5 to 1.75 percent.

When interest rates begin to rise, it pumps more money into the economy. The banks, therefore, have more cash available to lend and lower interest rates.

Back in September, the target range was 1.75 to 2 percent. So, with rates spiking as high as 10 percent, the Fed was compelled to spring to action.

Markets Don’t Believe The Fed

Fed Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has repeatedly said that treasury purchases are not quantitative easing (QE), whereby the central bank snaps up government bonds to boost the money supply and buttress economic growth.

Experts, however, believe the central bank is in effect implementing round four of the QE program, following three rounds between 2009 and 2015.

“The burst in the repo market is telling us that risk and debt accumulation are much higher than estimated and it has taken a disguised QE program to mildly contain it,” Daniel Lacalle, author of “Escape from the Central Bank Trap” wrote in an article for mises.org.

Meanwhile, Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer of Bleakley Advisory Group, editor of The Boock Report and CNBC contributor, is of the opinion that the markets view any increase in the size of the Fed’s balance sheet as QE.

The S&P 500 rallied for six straight weeks, starting from the second week of October to the second week of November. The index fell by 0.33 percent last week only to clock a fresh record high of 3,154 on Wednesday.

BTC A Hedge Against Monetary Indiscipline?

The popular narrative in the crypto markets is that bitcoin is effectively digital gold and a hedge against monetary and fiscal indiscipline.

Anthony Pompliano, Founder And Partner At Morgan Creek Digital Assets Told Coindesk:

“Bitcoin is headed towards a unique situation – lower interest rates, more QE, and the [miners’ reward] halving in 2020. These three events occurring near the same time should serve as rocket fuel for Bitcoin over the next 2–3 years.”

Indeed, the top cryptocurrency’s monetary policy is fixed – the mining rewards are reduced by 50 percent every four years. Essentially, the pace of supply expansion is reduced by half every four years as opposed to major central banks, which have been expanding money supply since 2009.

Looking ahead, the Fed is likely to continue expanding its balance sheet in the near future, as the money market is unlikely to return to normalcy any time soon, according to JPMorgan Chase. With bitcoin set to cut miner rewards next May, the bitcoin-Fed monetary policy divergence is set to widen further.

It’s therefore not surprising that the likes of Cameron Winklevoss, founder of Winklevoss Capital Management, are extremely bullish on BTC:

Bitcoin May Benefit From QE’s Cantillon Effect

The Cantillon Effect refers to the change in relative prices resulting from a shift in the money supply. It argues that money injection (QE and other inflation-boosting policies) may not change an economy’s output over the long-term. However, as newly created money travels through the economy, it affects different sectors of the economy differently.

For instance, the expected increase in the money supply due to QE or rate cuts is first priced in by financial markets. Put simply, people who are most invested in the stock market, real estate are the first to benefit from the inflationary policies.

By the time new investors enter the market, the assets are already overpriced. Further, saving becomes difficult with low-interest rates and the falling purchasing power of the currency.

A prolonged period of QE, therefore, may force investors to diversify their investments into bitcoin, which is deflationary in nature, as noted by analyst Pierre Rochard in August.

Backing Rochard’s view is Gabor Gurbacs, digital asset strategist/director at VanEck/MVIS, who told CoinDesk that both bitcoin and gold could benefit from QE-led dollar devaluation and asset inflation.

Gurbacs Said:

“Central banks expanding their balance sheets is quantitative easing in disguise. In effect, central banks buy government bonds and expand the repo market program with the intent to keep money markets in check. Bitcoin and gold may provide an alternative to and potentially a hedge against catastrophic failures in such heavily controlled central banking systems.”

Some may argue that BTC is not a haven asset and tends to track equities more closely.

“Prior bitcoin bull runs were characterized by a gradual decline in equity market volatility. For example, we’ve noted its, albeit imperfect, inverse relationship with the VIX Index over longer time horizons (i.e. 2017 run-up),” according to analysts at Delphi Digital.

Even if we consider BTC a risky asset, the Fed’s QE still appears to be a price-bullish development.

The central bank conducted three rounds of QE between 2009 and 2015, during which time the S&P 500, a benchmark for risk assets across the globe, rallied by more than 200 percent. Gold, a classic safe-haven asset, rose from $800 to $1,921 in the three years to 2011 only to fall back to $1,050 by December 2015.

Updated: 12-4-2019

Fed Pumps $70.1 Billion In One-Day Liquidity Into Financial Markets

Central bank continues interventions aimed at ensuring the financial system has enough liquidity.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York added $70.1 billion in temporary liquidity to financial markets on Wednesday.

The intervention via overnight repurchase agreements, or repos. Eligible banks offered the Fed $54.9 billion in Treasurys and $15.2 billion in mortgage securities, and the Fed accepted all of it.

Fed repo interventions take in Treasury and mortgage securities from eligible banks in what is effectively a short-term loan of central-bank cash, collateralized by the securities.

The Fed’s interventions are aimed at ensuring that the financial system has enough liquidity and that short-term borrowing rates are stable and consistent with Fed goals, with the central bank’s federal-funds rate staying within the 1.5%-to-1.75% target range. The effective fed-funds rate stood at 1.55% on Tuesday. The broad general collateral rate for repo trading stood at 1.51%, also for Tuesday.

The Fed has been intervening in markets in the current fashion since mid-September, when short-term rates unexpectedly shot up on a confluence of factors. The Fed has used similar operations for decades to manage short-term rates.

Since the large interventions started, money-market rates have calmed down. The Fed is using temporary operations to tamp down any possible wild moves, while purchasing Treasury bills to build up reserves in the banking system. It hopes that by buying Treasury bills, the central bank will be able to cut back on repo interventions at the start of next year.

The Fed currently expects to buy Treasury bills through the middle of next year.

Updated: 12-5-2019

Fed Adds $107.4 Billion in Short-Term Liquidity to Financial Markets

New York Fed’s action includes overnight repurchase agreements totaling $78.7 billion.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York added $107.4 billion in temporary liquidity to financial markets Thursday.

The intervention via overnight repurchase agreements, or repos, totaled $78.7 billion. There was also a $28.7 billion 14-day repo operation. The Fed took all the securities offered to it by eligible banks.

Fed repo interventions take in Treasury and mortgage securities from eligible banks in what is effectively a short-term loan of central-bank cash, collateralized by the securities.

The Fed’s interventions are aimed at ensuring that the financial system has enough liquidity and that short-term borrowing rates are stable and consistent with Fed goals, with the central bank’s federal-funds rate staying within the 1.5%-to-1.75% target range. The effective fed-funds rate stood at 1.55% on Wednesday. The broad general collateral rate for repo trading stood at 1.50%, also for Wednesday.

The Fed has been intervening in markets in the current fashion since mid-September, when short-term rates unexpectedly shot up on a confluence of factors. The Fed has used similar operations for decades to manage short-term rates.

Since the large interventions started, money-market rates have calmed down. The Fed is using temporary operations to tamp down any possible wild moves, while purchasing Treasury bills to build up reserves in the banking system. It hopes that by buying Treasury bills, the central bank will be able to cut back on repo interventions at the start of next year.

The central bank currently expects to buy Treasury bills through the middle of next year.

The Fed is also taking stock of whether post-financial-crisis banking regulations may be causing issues in the markets by driving banks to hold reserves over other highly liquid securities. When it comes to the September tumult, these regulations “were probably not the decisive contributors, but they were contributors and I think we need to examine them,” Fed Vice Chairman for Supervision Randal Quarles told a congressional panel Wednesday.

Updated: 12-5-2019

Fed’s Quarles Says There Are Now More ‘Options’ Than Just Bailing Out Failing Banks

Pressed at Senate hearing if there are still banks that are too big to fail, regulator doesn’t give ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer.

When Sen. John Kennedy asked Fed Vice Chairman for Banking Supervision Randal Quarles on Thursday if banks were too big to fail, he didn’t get the ‘”yes” or “no” answer he was looking for.

Instead, at a Senate Banking Committee hearing, Quarles chose to reframe the question.

“The way that I look at that question is, will regulators in the future or the government in the future, when it’s faced with stress at a large institution, have an option other than providing support for the continued life of the institution,” Quarles replied to Kennedy.

“I think those options will exist,” he added.

t is a rite of passage for banking regulators to be pressed by lawmakers on whether or not banks are too big to fail.

During his Senate confirmation hearing, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said that there are no banks that are too big to fail.

“I think we’ve made a great deal of progress on that,” Powell said, citing the higher capital requirements and new rules that regulators had imposed on banks.

Like Powell, Quarles credited higher capital and liquidity requirements as a means of preemptively stopping banks from becoming reliant on a government bailout in the event that they fail.

“At the same time, we must be conscious that we have not actually tested the failure of a large bank in the marketplace — surely a good thing!” he said.

Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, echoed Quarles’ caution.

“Our economy’s much better and it is still healthy, but we know at some point we’ll have a recession,” Kennedy said. “I think it was [Warren] Buffett who said ‘You don’t know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out.’”

Earlier this year, the Financial Stability Board, a global forum for regulators which Quarles chairs, announced a year-long initiative aimed at determining if post-crisis reforms were successful at preventing banks from becoming too big to fail. The FSB report is set to be published in June 2020.

Shortly after the initiative launched, Quarles said in a speechthat “the FSB and other global standard-setters developed a framework and a set of policy measures intended to reduce the moral hazard risks posed by systemically important financial institutions.”

Updated: 12-9-2019

Fed Officials Close To Filling Two Top Markets Jobs

New York Federal Reserve in final stages of finding replacements for roles open since June.

Top Federal Reserve officials are in the final stages of a search to fill two top staff jobs overseeing its financial markets operations, according to people familiar with the matter.

Candidates who have been considered for the New York Fed posts include private-sector economists Daleep Singh and Charles Himmelberg, according to these people. Lorie Logan, the interim manager of the central bank’s asset portfolio, is also seen as a front-runner for one of the two positions, these people said.

The person in one of the jobs will oversee the central bank’s $4 trillion securities portfolio and open market operations, implementing Fed officials’ interest rate decisions. The other will handle the markets group’s operations and technology.

The two positions were created to assume the responsibilities previously held by one person, Simon Potter, who was ousted in June by New York Fed President John Williams.

The decision comes as Fed officials are debating numerous technical decisions to fine-tune their control of very short-term interest rates following a mid-September spike in a key overnight lending rate.

Mr. Singh is currently chief North American economist at SPX Capital, a Brazilian investment fund. He served in the Treasury Department’s international division and markets room from 2011 to 2016, when he was named acting assistant secretary for financial markets, a position he served until the end of the Obama administration in 2017. Before that, he worked at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Mr. Himmelberg is chief markets economist at Goldman Sachs, where he has worked since 2005. He worked at the New York Fed from 2001 to 2005 and taught economics at Columbia University and New York University. He has co-written several papers with Simon Gilchrist, a Boston University economist who has also collaborated on research with Mr. Williams.

Ms. Logan has worked at the New York Fed since 1999 and played a prominent role in developing and implementing the Fed’s post-crisis-era policies, including the expansion of the $4 trillion asset portfolio and the tools used to help unwind that support when the Fed lifted interest rates from near zero earlier this decade.

None of the candidates responded to inquiries seeking comment. Fed representatives declined to comment. It couldn’t be learned if officials are considering additional candidates.

The appointments are the most important facing Mr. Williams, who became New York Fed president in June 2018 after leading the San Francisco Fed for seven years.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the head of the New York Fed’s markets desk has been the most high-profile staff job at the central bank. The people who have held the role were highly influential in helping officials create and employ new policy tools.

The markets desk implements Fed policy by buying and selling securities in trades with private financial firms, and the officer briefs top officials at each policy meeting on the state of the markets and the working of central-bank policies.

The personnel search has drawn added attention because the Fed has “lost some confidence among market participants over the last few months that they’re on top of things,” said Julia Coronado, a former Fed economist who runs an economic consulting firm and is on an advisory panel at the New York Fed.

Interest rates in very short-term lending markets rose sharply in mid-September due to shortages of funds that banks were willing to lend.

The Fed responded by injecting billions of dollars into markets to pull rates down to its target range.

Wall Street veterans and former Fed officials said that tapping two outsiders for the jobs could further hurt flagging morale at the New York Fed. Ms. Logan served as Mr. Potter’s deputy and had been groomed to succeed him. “She is widely regarded for her competence and experience,” said Ms. Coronado.

When Fed officials met in a rare videoconference in early October, Ms. Logan briefed officials on steps to address temporary money-market volatility. The rate-setting committee unanimously adopted a proposal she outlined to purchase $60 billion a month in short-term Treasury bills.

Those purchases could decline over time and will last at least into the second quarter of next year. They are designed to replace the daily and week-to-week cash injections the Fed has been conducting to prevent further funding strains.

In late May, Mr. Williams roiled the New York Fed when he announced Mr. Potter and another senior executive would be leaving.

People familiar with the matter said the departure had less to do with particular policy disputes than with tension over day-to-day management issues including personnel, promotions and strategic direction. Tensions had been building for months between the two men and their bosses, Mr. Williams and Michael Strine, the bank’s operating chief.

In addition to monetary-policy implementation, Mr. Potter’s portfolio included a range of issues including cybersecurity and technology. His departure followed a problem-plagued technology project the markets group oversaw called Titan, a front-to-back revamp of the Treasury’s electronic system for receiving and processing bids sent into U.S. Treasury auctions.

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and Vice Chairman Richard Clarida are said to be participating in the search process for the portfolio manager candidate, according to people familiar with the process.

Promoting from within the bank could help improve morale that was unsettled first by the management shake-up in June and later by the market rupture in September.

“I am impressed by how strong our team has been,” Mr. Williams told reporters last week. “We haven’t lost a step or missed a cue on any of this. They’ve done a fantastic job.”

Updated: 12-11-2019

Credit Suisse Shocking Call: Fed Will Launch ‘Qe4’ Before Year-End To Stem Street Cash Crunch

Key Points

A fourth round of quantitative easing will be needed before year’s end to address stresses in short-term lending markets, according to Credit Susse analyst Zoltan Pozsar.
So-called QE4 would help rebuild bank reserves, which have dropped as the Fed has shrunk its balance sheet, Pozsar said.
Market experts continue to dissect the problems in repo markets that flared up in mid-September.

The Federal Reserve could be launching another round of money-printing in the next few weeks as problems in the overnight lending markets reemerge and force the central bank into more aggressive action, according to a Credit Suisse analysis.

A fourth version of quantitative easing — often referred to as “money-printing” for the way the Fed uses digitally created money to buy bonds from big financial institutions — would be needed by year’s end to bridge a funding gap as banks scramble for scarce reserves, Zoltan Pozsar, Credit Suisse’s managing director for investment strategy and research, said in a note to clients.

“If we’re right about funding stresses, the Fed will be doing ‘QE4’ by year-end,” Pozsar wrote. “Treasury yields can spike into year-end, and the Fed will have to shift from buying bills to buying what’s on sale – coupons.”

Diagnosing The Causes

Fed Adds $57.52 Billion To Financial System In Latest Repo Transaction

Interventions aimed at ensuring the financial system has enough liquidity to keep short-term borrowing rates stable, consistent with Fed goals.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York added roughly $57.52 billion in temporary liquidity to financial markets Thursday.

In two operations in the form of repurchase agreements, or repos, the Fed injected $26.25 billion in overnight liquidity and about $31.27 billion in 14-day liquidity.

The repo interventions take in Treasury and mortgage securities from eligible banks in what is effectively a short-term loan of central-bank cash, collateralized by the securities.

The Fed’s money-market operations are aimed at ensuring that the financial system has enough liquidity to keep short-term borrowing rates stable and consistent with Fed goals, with the central bank’s federal-funds rate staying within the 1.5%-to-1.75% target range.

The Fed has said repo operations are technical in nature and have no broader economic implications.

The Fed has been intervening in markets in the current fashion since mid-September, when short-term rates unexpectedly shot up on a confluence of factors, the biggest of which stemmed from corporate-tax payments and the settlement of Treasury debt auctions. The Fed has used similar operations for decades to manage short-term rates.

Since the large interventions started, money-market rates have calmed. The Fed is using temporary operations to tamp down any possible wild moves, while purchasing Treasury bills to build up reserves in the banking system. The central bank hopes that by buying Treasury bills, it will be able to cut back on repo interventions at the start of next year.

The central bank currently expects to buy Treasury bills through the middle of next year.

The Fed is legally charged by Congress to keep inflation low and stable, and to promote maximum sustainable job growth. As it has for decades, the Fed seeks to accomplish these mandates by setting the level of short-term interest rates, which then determines a baseline for the overall cost of credit in the economy.

Updated: 12-21-2019

A Decade of Quantitative Easing Has Paved the Way for the Age of Digital Currency

Our social media-constrained attention spans make it hard to focus on anything lasting longer than 24 hours, let alone a decade.

So, we risk missing the big, secular trends that lead to the kinds of paradigm shifts Bridgewater Associates founder and co-chairman Ray Dalio speaks of. Once they’ve occurred, and the world you were used to suddenly disappears, it’s too late.

Thankfully, the Roman calendar periodically offers an excuse to sit back and reflect on longer time frames. We have one of those moments right now: the end of the 2010s.

For most capital market investors, the past 10 years are perhaps best described as the “decade of QE.” And they don’t mean a British monarch or an ocean liner.

Through a radical policy of “quantitative easing” introduced to counter the “zero lower bound” problem in interest rates, the central banks of the U.S., the euro zone, and Japan have added almost $10 trillion in assets to their balance sheets since the end of 2009.

Given that massive surfeit, nothing else mattered much to financial markets. Stocks, bonds and commodities moved in ever closer correlation to one another. Mostly they rose, though sometimes they fell, all in lock-step dependence on monetary policymakers administering the drug of QE.

There are many reasons to believe that this massive intervention has created a giant distortion.

One that gets attention is the fact that, at one point, $17 trillion of dollars in bonds traded at negative yields this year, meaning that investors had too much cash and were willing to pay “safe” creditors for the privilege of taking their money.

But there are other warning signs that the QE-fueled market runup is starkly out of line with the realities of the world. As Bank of America chief strategist Michael Harnett put it in a recent research report, “We enter the next decade with interest rates at 5,000-year lows, the largest asset bubble in history, a planet that is heating up, and a deflationary profile of debt, disruption, and demographics.”

So, while the decade of QE might seem like the ultimate expression of central bank power and influence, the next decade may produce the opposite: a reversal that reveals central bankers’ impotence. The fear is that monetary authorities have spent all their ammunition, leaving nothing for the next crisis.

That Would Mean A Paradigm Shift Is Coming. What Would It Look Like?

Also, The Cryptocurrency Decade

A new class of investor that emerged this past decade believes it knows the answer. They’d call the past ten years the “decade of cryptocurrency,” and they’d have a strong case.

In the future, when we look back on the emergence of bitcoin, we may well conclude it was the most important financial development of our time. Like nothing else, it changed the way we think about money.

That said, I’m not convinced the post-QE era will be the bitcoin era.

Bitcoin’s daily transaction flow, usually in the low billions of dollars, pales in comparison to the trillions in fiat currencies traded each day in foreign exchange markets. More likely than bitcoin becoming the new global monetary standard, I’d say, is that it becomes digital gold. In other words, that bitcoin will be to the digital era what gold was to the analog era: a safe-haven store of value that’s free from government interference.

Even so, to believe bitcoin is having no impact on the broader world of money is naïve. The biggest, most important developments in finance right now – namely, the digital currency aspirations of central banks such as the People’s Bank of China and the European Central Bank, as well as the Libra project launched by Facebook – trace a direct line to bitcoin and its crypto imitators.

Those fiat-backed prototypes are fundamentally different from decentralized cryptocurrencies in that their record-keeping and monetary policy features are centrally managed. Yet they still borrow heavily from the core breakthroughs that bitcoin established.

The protocols behind these new fiat-backed digital coins will, for example, create digital scarcity, meaning that, like cryptocurrencies, they can function as a de facto form of cash or bearer instrument. That’s quite different from the bank-issued IOUs of our current payments system. Also, they’ll essentially be programmable, which when combined with smart contracts and wallet-enabled internet-of-things (IoT) devices will transform the world’s commerce.

But the biggest, most politically important disruption will be to the dollar- and banking-led world of finance.

If digital fiat currencies become commonplace for payments, they’ll eventually remove banks for that core function of economic exchange, relegating them to longer-term lending functions. That will, in turn, mean that banks are no longer engaged by central banks as the core intermediaries for managing our monetary conditions.

Also, if coin-to-coin atomic swaps and smart contract-based escrow solutions are used in cross-border transactions, the rise of digital fiat might quickly spell the end of the dollar’s dominance of global trade, with profound implications for the United States.

The upshot of all this is that central banks will initially acquire even more direct control over monetary conditions. However, they will do so within a digitized environment in which no single currency enjoys global hegemonic dominance and in which users can more easily move in and out of state, private or decentralized currencies of their choosing. That increased currency competition should, in theory, impose a constraint on each sovereign’s capacity to debase their citizens’ money.

We face a paradigm shift, in other words.

When they come to write about this period, my guess is that historians will look upon the 2010s as the decade that set up that shift. Explaining it, they’ll point to two main developments: that QE exposed the limitations of the existing, bank-centric system and that cryptocurrencies emerged to posit an alternative model.

Updated: 12-26-2019

Fed’s U-Turn on Assets Faces a Year-End Test

To halt money-market volatility the Fed flooded markets with cash—and it accumulated assets. But at year’s end some banks may limit lending.

The Federal Reserve over the last three months has flooded money markets with hundreds of billions of dollars in cash to avoid a repeat of volatility that roiled cash markets in September.

The success of the moves—which reversed roughly half of the Fed’s shrinkage of its asset portfolio over the prior two years—will encounter a test around Dec. 31. That is when some financial institutions could face incentives from regulations to limit their lending, which could cause supply and demand imbalances for cash.

Fed officials have said they believe deposits by banks held at the Fed, called reserves, grew scarce enough in mid-September to put pressure on an obscure but important lending rate in the market for repurchase agreements, or repos. Banks and other firms use repos as a way to borrow cash for short periods, pledging government securities as collateral.

“You can flood the markets with reserves but are the reserves going to be redistributed to the corners of the markets that need it? That’s the big question,” said Ward McCarthy, chief financial economist at financial-services company Jefferies LLC.

To prevent a squeeze from happening again, Fed officials have been buying short-term Treasury bills from financial institutions to put more reserves back into the financial system. They also have conducted daily injections of liquidity into markets.

Altogether, those operations could add nearly $500 billion in net liquidity to markets around Dec. 31.

The end of the year is an important date because large banks could limit lending activities in derivatives and repo markets to guard against extra regulatory burdens. For these banks, their lending profile on Dec. 31 is used to determine how much equity capital they must raise against their liabilities.

In the last few years, repo rates have typically been no more than a 10th of a percentage point above or below the Fed’s benchmark rate, but on Dec. 31, 2018, they widened by 2.75 percentage points.

This spread grew again on Sept. 17 after large payments of corporate taxes and Treasury auction settlements the day before resulted in a major transfer to the government of cash held in the banking system. This flow of payments reduced reserves.

“The markets acted as though reserves had become scarce,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said at a Dec. 11 news conference.

The September episode prompted the Fed to intervene in markets to prevent reserves from declining further. The central bank announced plans to provide overnight and 14-day loans in the repo market, and by mid-October had agreed on a scheme to keep reserves from declining further by purchasing $60 billion a month in Treasury bills.

“Their response has been very effective,” said Priya Misra, head of interest-rate strategy at TD Securities. “They were quick to acknowledge reserves dropped too low. They were very humble, and that level of humility is good to see.”

The September market stress may have also focused financial institutions that rely on repo funding to lock in financing ahead of the end of the year.

“There is some evidence that people are getting their ducks in a row,” said Seth Carpenter, chief U.S. economist at UBS Group AG and a former official at the Fed and the Treasury Department. He said he sees a one-in-three chance of repo-market issues at year-end.

If there were going to be destabilizing money-market pressures on Dec. 31 they should be cropping up now, said Mark Cabana, head of short-term interest-rate strategy research at Bank of America. “The concerns in my own mind have cooled significantly,” he said.

The Fed added hundreds of billions of dollars in reserves to the banking system earlier this decade when it purchased Treasury and mortgage securities to stimulate the economy when short-term interest rates were near zero. It began draining these reserves in 2017 by allowing more of those assets to mature without replacing them.

It stopped doing so in July, after cutting short-term rates in response to worries about the global growth outlook.

Reserves are a liability against assets on the Fed’s balance sheet, and they can decline when the Fed holds its balance sheet steady if other liabilities rise.

This is precisely what happened in August and early September, after the Treasury Department began rebuilding its general account—maintained at the Fed—after Congress suspended the federal borrowing limit. This cash balance is one of several liabilities on the Fed’s balance sheet that had been growing, further squeezing reserves out of the system.

Fed officials are also trying to determine whether postcrisis rules meant to assure major banks have a sufficient cash cushion to weather a crisis have led banks to hoard reserves, aggravating the September market tumult.

The episode caught Fed officials by surprise in part because they didn’t think reserves had grown especially scarce.

As the Fed fine-tunes its response to money-market volatility, its officials face a broader tension. They want to avoid spikes in the repo market—such as those related to the year-end funding pressures—that could interfere with their ability to set short-term interest rates.

But they don’t necessarily see their job as to eliminate volatility entirely from short-term lending markets. One risk: Stamping out volatility during normal times could yield more volatility when shocks hit.

“You do want to create room for repo rates to vary again, and create a margin where normal market forces can play out,” said Lou Crandall, chief economist at financial-research firm Wrightson ICAP.

What the Fed is doing right now, he said, appears designed to provide a guardrail for markets as the central bank and Wall Street learn more about any unexpected side effects from changes in market structure and regulation after years in which the Fed maintained a larger asset portfolio.

“We are going to be in an era for the next couple of years in which…money markets can experience severe distortions that are just inefficient,” Mr. Crandall said.

Updated: 1-8-2020

Big Banks Seek Less Liquidity From Fed Amid Stable Money-Market Rates

Fed injects $46.6 billion into markets via repurchase agreements.

Demand for the Federal Reserve’s short-term market liquidity offering ebbed a bit after robust interest at the start of the week.

The Fed injected $46.6 billion into markets via what are called overnight repurchase agreements, or repos.

Fed repo interventions take in bonds from eligible banks in what is effectively a short-term loan of central bank cash, collateralized by the securities. Banks eligible to access these operations are limited in the amount of liquidity they can tap from the Fed, and companies pay interest to the central bank for accessing its money.

The relatively modest demand for overnight Fed money comes after the Fed added nearly $100 billion Tuesday, via overnight and 14-day repo operations.

Some analysts have noted there is a modest uptick in frictions this week in money markets that are putting some upward pressure on borrowing rates, which may be why there is still ample demand for Fed liquidity offerings. On Tuesday, the effective federal-funds rate stood at 1.55%, versus a range of 1.50% and 1.75% set by the Fed.

The Fed has been adding significant amounts of short-term liquidity to financial markets since September, when short-term interest rates surged unexpectedly. At the time, major banks that normally lend cash short-term to other financial companies pulled back, causing money-market rates to go up. Most notably, the federal-funds rate, a key focus of central bank policy, moved above its range.

Fed repo interventions have been used for decades to control short-term rates. The Fed seeks to control the fed-funds rate to influence the overall cost of credit in the economy to accomplish its inflation and job mandates, set for the central bank by Congress.

Last Thursday, the Fed reported that its balance sheet had risen to $4.17 trillion as of Jan. 1 from $3.8 trillion in September. About $255.6 billion in repo interventions were also outstanding then.

Updated: 1-13-2020

New York Fed Adds $60.7 Billion To Financial Markets

Fed has been adding large amounts of short-term liquidity to markets since September.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York added $60.7 billion in overnight liquidity to financial markets on Monday.

Eligible banks offered $30.5 billion in U.S. Treasurys and $30.2 billion in agency securities to the central bank, taking considerably less liquidity than the $120 billion the Federal Reserve was willing to extend.

The amount of money taken by the banks was roughly in line with expectations and kept the total amount of temporary money sought by banks roughly steady.

The operations in the form of repurchase agreements, or repos, take in bonds from eligible banks in what is effectively a short-term loan of central-bank cash, collateralized by the securities. Banks eligible to access these operations are limited in the amount of liquidity they can tap from the Fed.

The banks pay interest to the central bank for accessing its money. The amount of money added by the Fed isn’t cumulative, as older operations may be maturing.

In its weekly update on its holdings, the Fed said last week that its balance sheet stood at $4.11 trillion as of Jan. 9, versus $3.8 trillion in September. About $210.6 billion in repo interventions were also outstanding then.

The Fed has been adding large amounts of short-term liquidity to financial markets since September, when short-term interest rates surged unexpectedly. Then, big banks that normally lend cash short term to other financial companies pulled back, causing money-market rates to go up. Most notably, the federal-funds rate, a key focus of central-bank policy, moved above its range.

When the Fed restarted its repo operations after a halt for just over a decade, it said it expected to wind them down by the end of January as Treasury-bill buying bolstered underlying reserves levels. The Fed also said it hoped to end its balance-sheet-expanding Treasury-bill buying by around June. Fed repo operations have brought calm to money markets, and short-term rates haven’t shown big swings.

But recent comments from a top Fed official, as well as market expectations, likely point to repos operations being continued into the spring, as officials work out a more enduring solution for keeping short-term rates in line with central bank goals.

Updated: 1-19-2020

Global Banks Rush Back Into Repo Markets

Increased dependence comes as growth among the main shadow-banking funding sources has slowed.

Global banks’ use of funding from markets rather than from customer deposits has grown rapidly in recent years, mostly in the form of short-term funding, which was a central problem of the 2008 financial crisis, according to a body that monitors global financial risks.

However, that growing use has been spread unevenly around the globe. Banks in the U.S., U.K. and Canada have become among the biggest lenders into short-term financing markets, while banks in France and Japan are now the biggest borrowers after rapid growth in all these markets in 2017 and 2018.

Short-term market funding is risky because it can suddenly disappear when lenders—typically money-market funds, fund managers or cash-rich banks—get concerned about the creditworthiness of borrowers, who can then be forced into a fire-sale of assets if the lenders pull back.

To try to spot this sort of trouble coming, the Financial Stability Board, a global group of financial regulators, has produced annual reports on the size and growth of what it calls nonbank financial intermediation, also known as shadow banking, since 2011.

The latest report, published Sunday, shows a sharp slowdown in growth among the key types of shadow-banking vehicles that pose the most bank-like risks to global financial stability. They include bond funds, mortgage-backed debt and other kinds of securitizations. Assets of these vehicles grew just 1.7% in 2018, the most recent year covered in the new report, compared with an average annual growth rate of 8.5% between 2012 and 2017.

However, short-term market financing among banks, hedge funds, broker dealers and other asset managers grew strongly in 2018, particularly in repurchase agreements, or repos. This market endured a sharp spike in lending rates in the U.S. last September due to an oversupply of Treasurys, forcing the Federal Reserve to step in and inject funds.

Repo lending by banks jumped 21% to $5.9 trillion globally in 2018, according to the report, while borrowing by banks from this market also jumped by 15% to $6 trillion. Banks are net providers of cash in the U.K., U.S. and Canada, along with money-market funds and other asset managers. Borrowers are mostly hedge funds, finance companies and broker dealers—the name for investment banks that aren’t part of a larger banking group. In France and Japan, meanwhile, banks are net borrowers of cash.

Market-based funding can lead to faster growth of lending in an economy than banks would otherwise manage to produce on their own. “This may pose financial-stability risks by contributing to the buildup of leverage and maturity mismatches,” the report said.

Such funding also can increase interconnectedness between banks and other institutions, causing losses to spread more easily, and encourage cycles of lending booms and credit crunches.

“The monitoring report provides a significant resource for authorities to assess trends and risks from [nonbank financial institutions],” said Klaas Knot, president of the Dutch central bank and vice-chair of the Financial Stability Board.

The report monitors all market-based funding of financial assets through asset managers, insurance companies, pension funds, banks and instruments like mortgage-backed bonds and other forms of securitization.

The total assets of all nonbank financial institutions fell slightly for the first time since 2008 to $184 trillion in 2018. That was mainly due to the reduced market value of equities and debt assets in investment funds, insurers and pension funds.

Updated: 1-23-2020

Fed Repos Add $74.2 Billion, But Net Liquidity Declines Modestly

Because of past operations expiring, outstanding short-term Fed liquidity injections fell by $10 billion to $176.1 billion.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York intervened on Thursday with two temporary additions of liquidity that nevertheless amounted to a modest reduction in the overall amount of temporary liquidity the central bank is adding to financial markets.

The Fed added cash to money markets by a total of $74.2 billion via $44.15 billion in overnight repurchase agreements, or repo and via a $30 billion 14-day repo operation. But because of the expiration of past operations, the outstanding amount of short-term Fed liquidity injections fell by $10 billion to $176.1 billion.

Fed repo interventions take in U.S. Treasurys, agency and mortgage bonds from eligible banks in what is effectively a short-term loan of central-bank cash, collateralized by the securities. The banks tapping this cash are limited in the amount of liquidity they can take in exchange for their securities, and they pay interest to the central bank to get the funds.

Fed money-market interventions aim to keep the federal-funds rate within the central bank’s 1.5%-to-1.75% target range and limit the volatility of other money-market rates. The Fed restarted its repo operations in September after a decade long break due to unexpected money market volatility.

From there, it steadily increased the sizes of its operations. Demand for Fed money has waxed and waned, and by and large the Fed has restored calm to markets.

The Fed said last week that its balance sheet stood at $4.18 trillion as of Jan. 15, versus $3.8 trillion in September. Peak Fed holdings were $4.5 trillion in the wake of the financial crisis. About $229.5 billion in repo interventions were also outstanding on Jan. 15, versus $210.6 billion on Jan. 9.

The Fed had expected to stop its repo operations at the end of the month, but recently extended them into mid-February. Most now expect the repo operations will continue for some time, even as the Fed buys $60 billion a month in Treasurys to bolster banking-sector reserves and diminish the need for repo intervention tweaks.

The Fed has yet to settle on an enduring fix for keeping short-term rate movements orderly. Markets ran into trouble in September after a tax payment date and Treasury debt settlement caused some banks to pull back on lending to each other in short-term repo markets.

While the Fed’s liquidity isn’t a bailout—banks can only access it by handing bonds to the Fed—central bank money has nevertheless improved lending in money markets, even as its fueled fears the central bank is driving unwarranted risk taking in financial markets.

Fed Liquidity Operations Face Conflicting Currents in Wednesday Interventions

The central bank intervenes in the short-term money markets to maintain liquidity.

The New York Fed market interventions faced a conflicting demand for central bank liquidity on Wednesday.

On one hand, it implemented a $49.8 billion overnight repurchase agreement, or repo, operation with eligible banks that took in $31.5 billion in Treasurys, $1.5 billion in agencies and $16.9 billion in mortgages, in exchange for central bank money. But it also implemented a $15.6 billion reverse repo with other firms, mostly money market funds, that took liquidity out of the market, as five firms took Treasurys in exchange for a de-facto one day loan of cash to the central bank.

Fed repo interventions take in U.S. Treasurys, agency and mortgage bonds from eligible banks in what is effectively a short-term loan of central-bank cash, collateralized by the securities. The banks tapping this cash are limited in the amount of liquidity they can take in exchange for their securities, and they pay interest to the central bank to get the funds. Reverse repos do the opposite and take in cash from money funds and similar firms in exchange for short-term loans of Treasurys.

For the repo operation, eligible banks—called primary dealers—took less than the $120 billion the Fed was willing to offer. Fed repo operation essentially maintains levels of liquidity the Fed has already added in past interventions, which have been going on in a large scale since September.

For some in the market, the size of the reserve repo operation points to possible frictions in the markets, as the firms that lent the Fed the Fed cash in exchange for Treasurys didn’t tap private market sources.

The Fed said this past Thursday that its balance sheet stood at $4.18 trillion as of Wednesday, versus $3.8 trillion in September. Peak Fed holdings were $4.5 trillion in the wake of the financial crisis. About $229.5 billion in repo interventions were also outstanding on Wednesday, versus $210.6 billion on Jan. 9.

Fed money-market interventions are aimed at keeping the federal-funds rate within the 1.5%-to-1.75% target range, and to limit the volatility of other money-market rates. The Fed restarted its repo operations in September after unexpected market volatility and steadily increased the sizes of its operations. Demand for Fed money has waxed and waned, and by and large the Fed has restored calm to markets.

The Fed has yet to settle on an enduring fix for keeping short-term rate movements orderly. Markets ran into trouble in September after a tax payment date and Treasury debt settlement caused some banks to pull back on lending to each other in short-term repo markets. While the Fed’s liquidity isn’t a bailout—banks can only access it by handing bonds to the Fed—central bank money has nevertheless improved lending in money markets.

Updated: 1-24-2020

The Fed Can Take These Two Steps If Its Balance Sheet Expansion Is Making Markets Too Frothy, Says Key BofA Strategist

Now that it has calmed the repo market, the Federal Reserve might consider a few regulatory tweaks to tame risk-taking as its balance sheet expands, says Bank of America Global Research’s Mark Cabana, who saw the funding squeeze coming last September.

Whether or not the Fed believes its moves to soothe money markets constitute a form of unintended monetary policy easing, Cabana says the U.S. central bank could tinker with certain regulations to make financial conditions less accommodative without having to terminate its balance-sheet expansion, in a Thursday research note.

After the funding squeeze in short term U.S. money markets in September, the Fed not only conducted billions of dollars worth of repo auctions to provide liquidity via short term loans to cash-starved banks, brokers and hedge funds, but it also bought U.S. Treasury bills.

The Fed’s actions have drawn criticism for pushing up the prices of stocks and other assets despite protests from the U.S. central bank which has said monetary policy has remained on hold since the last of its three interest rate cuts in October.

To counter excessive risk-taking resulting from the extra easy money, Cabana offers two solutions.

First, the Fed could take measures to wean banks away from their reliance on reserves held at the central bank as their preferred form of capital used to assess liquidity requirements under regulations introduced after 2008 crisis which demand banks carry enough cash to handle sudden outflows, he said.

For example, the opening of a standing repo facility, where market participants could temporarily exchange their government bonds for cash, could increase the incentives for banks to hold Treasurys instead of cash reserves. This could serve as one solution to worries that banks aren’t lending sufficient funds to money markets.

Secondly, the central bank could increase the counter cyclical capital buffer also introduced after the 2008 crisis. The idea behind this measure is to impose additional capital requirements on banks when the economy and financial markets are doing well so that the financial sector does not get caught out during an economic downturn.

“However, the bar may be high to use this as a signal for overly easy financial conditions given risks of a negative market interpretation,” he said.

Cabana acknowledges the adjustments he proposes are unlikely to take place anytime soon, but he said the central bank may still see regulations as the most convenient way to rein in excesses in financial markets.

Investors have noted stocks and corporate bond prices both notched impressive gains since the Fed’s measures in September and October to increase the size of the balance sheet.

Updated: 1-28-2020

Federal Reserve’s Stimulus Led To A Market Rally Now It’s Concerned About How And When To Wind It Down

With Federal Reserve officials likely to hold interest rates steady in coming months, the focus of their meeting this week shifts to fine-tuning their control of short-term rates.

The Fed successfully flooded markets with cash late last year to avoid a spike in overnight lending rates. Now, officials have to decide when and how to wind down the program. The task could be more complicated if some market commentators are right that the moves have fueled a stock-market rally.

Fed Spread

The difference between the Fed’s benchmark rate and the cost of overnight lending in repo marketswidened last September, but volatility has declined significantly since then.

At issue is an obscure but important corner of finance—the market for repurchase agreements, or repos, in which banks and other firms borrow cash for short periods, pledging government securities as collateral.

Officials want to prevent volatility in the repo market from interfering with its control of the federal-funds rate, a benchmark that influences borrowing costs throughout the economy.

The Fed is likely to leave the rate unchanged Wednesday in a range between 1.5% and 1.75%.

Among the questions officials face: When and how fast to curtail the current expansion of the Fed’s asset portfolio, which has swollen to $4.1 trillion from $3.8 trillion in September. And whether to start a new facility to cap money-market rates, and if so, how to design it.

Some officials have been hesitant to create a new facility, in which the Fed would lend in the repo market permanently, because they don’t want too large a footprint in financial markets.

The latest problems materialized in September. Deposits by banks held at the Fed, called reserves, grew scarce enough to send the fed-funds rate upward unexpectedly. To prevent the cash crunch from leading to continued rate spikes, the Fed has been lending in the repo market daily.

Fed officials hope to retire these routine interventions in the next few months. To permanently rebuild reserve balances in the banking system, which would eliminate the need for daily repo lending, officials have been buying short-term Treasury bills since mid-October—around $180 billion so far.

Uncle Sam’s ClubThe Fed began shrinking its asset holdings in 2017 but reversed course last year.

They expect to buy bills at least through April, May or June, but haven’t indicated if or when they will slow from the current rate of $60 billion per month in purchases. The Fed is likely to buy a smaller amount of Treasury securities after that to keep up with the growth of other liabilities on its balance sheet, such as currency in circulation.

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has emphasized that the purchases don’t represent a return to the post-2008 stimulus programs, called quantitative easing or QE, in which the Fed purchased hundreds of billions of longer-term Treasury and mortgage securities in multiple rounds.

With QE, the Fed bought long-dated securities to reduce long-term interest rates to encourage borrowing, spending and investment. Fed officials say the current program is different because they are purchasing short-term bills that they believe provide little stimulus.

QE also had potentially powerful effects as a signaling device about the Fed’s broader intentions to hold rates very low. This time, officials seek to avoid sending such a signal by saying repeatedly that the bill purchases are for technical and not economic reasons.

Nevertheless, some market commentators have tied steady stock-market gains since mid-October to the bill-purchase program. That, in turn, has prompted at least one Fed official to worry about investors pushing up stock prices because they are misreading the Fed’s intentions.

“I believe very strongly we’re going to need to find a way to curtail the growth in the balance sheet,” said Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan at a moderated discussion earlier this month. He has called the program a “derivative” of QE and worried the recent intervention was fueling “excesses and imbalances that may be hard to deal with later.”

Most Fed officials haven’t signaled the same concerns. Several have said their efforts to avoid a rate spike in late December suggest their tools are working effectively.

Updated: 1-28-2020

Fed Adds $84.7 Billion in New Money to Markets, But Overall Liquidity Stable

Fresh injection of money, coupled with expiring older operations, left overall amount of repo operations essentially the same.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York added $84.7 billion in fresh liquidity to money markets on Tuesday, but overall temporary money added to the financial system by the central bank held steady.

The Fed implemented a $55.75 billion overnight repurchase agreement, or repo, operation, and a $28.95 billion 14-day day repo operation. In both operations eligible banks, called primary dealers, took less liquidity than the Fed was willing to offer. Tallying the Fed’s latest additions and what was expiring from older repo interventions left the overall amount of repo operations essentially the same, at $181.7 billion.

Fed repo interventions take in Treasurys, agency and mortgage bonds from eligible banks in what is effectively a short-term loan of central-bank cash, collateralized by the securities. Primary dealers are limited in the amount of liquidity they can take in exchange for their securities, and they pay interest to the central bank to get the funds.

The level of outstanding Fed repos has fallen considerably since the turn of the year. The Fed had flooded the market with money to ensure stability amid concerns that a variety of factors would cause money-market lenders to refrain from their normal lending and, in turn, push up rates. Rates have become consistently calm, suggesting the Fed’s strategy has, in the short term, worked well.

Fed money-market interventions aim to keep the federal-funds rate within the central bank’s 1.5%-to-1.75% target range and limit the volatility of other money-market rates. The Fed controls the fed-funds rate to influence the overall cost of borrowing in the U.S. economy as part of its efforts to achieve the job and inflation goals set for it by Congress.

The Fed restarted its repo operations in September in the wake of unexpected money-market volatility. Demand for Fed money has waxed and waned. The Fed has used repo operations for decades to influence short-term rate settings.

The central bank said last week that as of Wednesday its balance sheet stood at $4.15 trillion, down $29.9 billion from the week before. Fed holdings were at $3.8 trillion in September and peak Fed holdings were $4.5 trillion in the wake of the financial crisis. About $186.1 billion in repos were outstanding on Wednesday.

Updated: 1-31-2020

Fed Intervenes With $45.55 Billion Weekend Repo, But Overall Liquidity Ticks Down

Fed money-market interventions are aimed at keeping the federal-funds rate within the central bank’s 1.5%-to-1.75% target range.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York executed a $45.55 billion weekend liquidity operation Friday, which resulted in led overall temporary central bank liquidity to tick lower.

The Fed added the money to financial markets via what’s called a repurchase agreement operation, or repo, that expires on Monday. It took in $28.2 billion in Treasurys, $1 billion in agencies and $16.35 billion in mortgage bonds from eligible banks, known as primary dealers.

With $48.78 billion in outstanding repos maturing Friday, overall temporary liquidity provided by the Fed via repo transactions ebbed $3.2 billion to $170.5 billion.

Fed repo interventions take in Treasurys, agency and mortgage bonds from the dealers, in what is effectively a short-term loan of central-bank cash, collateralized by the bonds. Primary dealers are limited in the amount of liquidity they can take in exchange for their securities, and they pay interest to the central bank to get the funds.

Fed money-market interventions are aimed at keeping the federal-funds rate within the central bank’s 1.5%-to-1.75% target range. The interventions also limit but not eliminate the volatility in other money-market rates. The Fed controls the fed-funds rate to influence the overall cost of borrowing in the U.S. economy as part of its efforts to achieve the job and inflation goals set for it by Congress.

Updated: 3-3-2020

Mnuchin Ready to Work With Congress on Emergency Funding Package

G-7 countries ready to cooperate on actions to guard against economic risks from coronavirus, officials say.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the administration looked forward to an emergency funding package from Congress to deal with the spreading coronavirus and signaled it is prepared to ask for more as authorities in the U.S. and around the world race to mitigate the economic impact of the epidemic.

“We stand ready to work closely with Congress on an emergency funding package and any other related issues,” Mr. Mnuchin told lawmakers on Tuesday. He also suggested the administration would consider an infrastructure package as part of a broader stimulus measure, if one is needed to shore up growth.

Mr. Mnuchin said officials also had begun to consider measures to support businesses facing disruptions related to the virus, as well as workers who may not have paid sick leave.

“We’re looking at all different types of options on the table to address all these issues,” he said. “As we come back later with recommendations we will work with Congress.”

Lawmakers are working through final issues this week on an emergency funding package for fighting the coronavirus that is expected to cost $7 billion to $8 billion. Partisan disagreements over how to price an eventual vaccine have delayed the release of an agreement, as Democrats push for the package to include funding for the government to purchase vaccines and therapeutics at an affordable price to then make available to the public. An agreement could come as soon as late Tuesday.

The Trump administration’s proposal last week to spend $2.5 billion—with $1.25 billion in new funds and $1.25 billion in repurposed funds—was seen by lawmakers as too low. President Trump has said he would accept any amount Congress approves.

Mr. Mnuchin also said U.S. officials are working to distribute close to a million coronavirus test kits in the country, which he said should be available very quickly.

“I have the utmost confidence that we have the best medical system in the world and we will do everything we can acting together to combat this,” he said to the House Ways and Means Committee.

Mr. Mnuchin spoke after finance ministers and central bank governors from the Group of Seven countries said they stand ready to cooperate on actions, including fiscal stimulus measures, to guard against economic risks from Covid-19

“Given the potential impacts of Covid-19 on global growth, we reaffirm our commitment to use all appropriate policy tools to achieve strong, sustainable growth and safeguard against downside risks,” the group said Tuesday following a morning conference call.

The statement stopped short of stating specific actions countries might take in response to the virus.

Mr. Mnuchin and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell led the early-morning conference call, which also included the finance ministers and central bank governors from Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.

“Alongside strengthening efforts to expand health services, G-7 finance ministers are ready to take actions, including fiscal measures where appropriate, to aid in the response to the virus and support the economy during this phase,” they said.

The statement also said G-7 central banks will continue to fulfill their mandates, including promoting price stability and economic growth “while maintaining the resilience of the financial system.”

The G-7 nations welcomed statements from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and other financial institutions pledging to use their tools to address economic and public health challenges stemming from the virus.

Stocks rebounded Monday following one of the worst weeks since the financial crisis, on hopes that central banks would step in to bolster global economic growth as the coronavirus epidemic continues to spread. The yield on the 10-year benchmark Treasury note fell to a new low Monday, settling at 1.085%.

Australia’s central bank on Tuesday reduced interest rates by a quarter percentage point to a record-low 0.50% after the coronavirus began to choke key exports, including foreign education and tourism.

More than 89,000 cases have been confirmed in some 60 countries around the world, with outbreaks widening in Iran, Italy and South Korea, as the number of cases outside mainland China crossed 10,000. More than 3,000 people have died around the globe.

Health officials in Washington state announced four additional deaths as a result of the virus on Monday, bringing the total U.S. death toll to six, and new cases were reported in California, Oregon, New Hampshire, Illinois and Georgia.

Mr. Powell said Friday that Fed officials “will use our tools and act as appropriate to support the economy.” The Bank of Japan also pledged to take action in response to the virus, and a senior European Central Bank official said Monday the ECB could take rates further into negative territory.

Economists are warning that governments can’t rely solely on lower interest rates to ease disruptions related to the virus, especially when rates are already historically low.

Some countries have already announced fiscal stimulus measures designed to prevent temporary slowdowns from turning into deeper downturns.

South Korea injected more than $13 billion in emergency funds last week to stoke economic activity. Italian officials said Sunday the government would consider offering tax credits for companies that report a 25% drop in revenues. In Hong Kong, which entered recession last year, the government has said it would give about $1,284 to each adult resident, and slash an income tax for nearly 2 million workers.

In a joint statement Monday, the leaders of the World Bank and IMF pledged to use their tools “to the fullest extent possible,” including emergency financing facilities, to help countries address public health and economic challenges from the virus.

President Trump said on Twitter last night that Democrats in Congress should consider a one-year payroll tax cut, and urged the Fed to lower interest rates.

A senior administration official said Monday the White House doesn’t see any immediate need to put together a broader fiscal policy response because the economy has been performing well and it is too soon to tell whether there will be persistent disruptions from the virus. Still, the official said the White House wants a rate cut because of declining commodity prices and long-term interest rates that signal global deflationary impulses.

Updated: 3-3-2020

Fed Sees Huge Demand For Repos; Tuesday Operations Total $120 Billion

Big banks’ demand for temporary liquidity exceeds limit.

Just ahead of an emergency Federal Reserve rate cut, big banks’ demand for Fed temporary liquidity shot higher and exceeded what the central bank was willing to provide on Tuesday, as financial markets remained deeply unsettled amid big worries about the coronavirus situation’s impact on the global economy.

But even as the Fed added substantial amounts of money to the market via two repurchase-agreement operations, or repos, its lever to affect the performance of the economy and the focus of its monetary-policy actions, the federal-funds rate, stood at an effective 1.59% on Monday, well within the official range 1.50% and 1.75% that prevailed on Monday.

The Fed lowered its target rate range by half a percentage point, to 1.00% and 1.25%. It said “the fundamentals of the U.S. economy remain strong. However, the coronavirus poses evolving risks to economic activity.” All members of the FOMC were on board with the easing.

The New York Fed’s two repo operations were significantly larger than recent interventions. Its overnight operation saw eligible banks take the $100 billion limit from the Fed even as they’d sought $108.61 billion in central-bank cash. The Fed’s 14-day repo operation injected $20 billion into the financial system, even as banks—called primary dealers—wanted $70.95 billion from the Fed.

With $78.14 billion in repos expiring today, the overall pool of temporary money the central bank is adding to the financial system rose by $41.9 billion to $195 billion, the highest level since late January. That compares with the $255.62 billion in repos that were outstanding on Jan. 1.

The large-scale Fed repos arrived as financial markets had been moving to expect aggressive Fed rate cuts to help protect the economy against trouble from the coronavirus situation. Investors’ anxiety has driven big stock-market declines and driven Treasury yields, the beneficiary of flight-to-safety borrowing, to historically low levels.

Large Fed operations could persist given the market’s anxiety level.

“We are in for lots of volatility all month,” said Scott Skyrm, executive vice president in fixed income and repo at Curvature Securities. The big Treasury market rally, driven by concern over the coronavirus, is generating some scarcity in Treasurys in the repo market, where banks borrow and lend bonds and cash short term.

Thomas Simons, economist at investment bank Jefferies, said he didn’t view the big repo demand as necessarily indicative of a bigger problem in the market. But he noted that in addition to banks trying to position for a Fed rate cut, there were also pressures relating to the settlement of around $56 billion in Treasury debt, “so there’s a little bit of added pressure on the market from the natural supply/demand for funding that typically happens around settlements during this period of heightened uncertainty.”

When the Fed does a repo transaction, it takes in U.S. Treasury, agency and mortgage bonds from eligible banks in a de facto short-term loan of central-bank cash, collateralized by the bonds. Primary dealers are limited in the amount of liquidity they can take in exchange for their securities, and they pay interest to the central bank to get the funds.

Fed money-market interventions are aimed at keeping the fed-funds rate within the central bank’s target range. The Fed controls the fed-funds rate to influence the overall cost of borrowing in the U.S. economy as part of its efforts to achieve the job and inflation goals set for it by Congress.

The Fed has been adding significant amounts of temporary liquidity to financial markets since September. Then, after a decadelong break, it restarted its repo operations amid unexpected volatility in short-term rate markets.

The Fed has been working to build up reserve levels in the banking system to ensure short-term-rate volatility is contained. It currently plans to wind down repo operations in April and end its Treasury bill purchases at some point in the second quarter. But the rapidly shifting outlook for markets and monetary policy has cast uncertainty on that plan.

Updated: 3-4-2020

Fed’s $100 Billion Repo Intervention Falls Short Of Bank Demand

Primary dealers sought $111.48 billion from the central bank.

Big banks’ demand for central bank cash remained very strong on Wednesday, leading the Federal Reserve Bank to add a fresh $100 billion to the financial system.

The Fed added the money via what’s called an overnight repurchase agreement operation, or repo. Eligible banks, called primary dealers, sought $111.48 billion from the central bank, exceeding the $100 billion cap the Fed places on overnight repos.

The heavy demand for Fed cash reprised the strong interest seen for Fed money on Tuesday, when the Fed added even more money to the financial system. As of Wednesday morning, the total amount of Fed repos outstanding held steady from Tuesday at $195 billion.

Repo outstanding levels had been falling over the recent weeks, but have ticked up over the last two days, although they are still short of the $255.62 billion that was outstanding on Jan. 1.

Driving the demand for Fed repos are highly unsettled markets, as traders and investors try to respond to the coronavirus and its potential economic impact. Treasury yields have fallen to historic lows and the Fed implemented a half percentage point emergency rate cut on Tuesday that also impacted trading and money market conditions. Some market participants have pointed to a high demand to hold Treasurys as a force pushing up short-term rates.

On Tuesday, the Fed lowered its overnight target range by half a percentage point to between 1.00% and 1.25%. Fed data Wednesday said the effective federal-funds rate stood at 1.59%, which was consistent where it should have been ahead of the rate cut. Other funding rates showed upward pressure however, the repo market broad general collateral rate was 1.63%, and the secured overnight financing rate was 1.64%.

Referring to the market where banks and firms borrow and lend cash short-term, Wrightson ICAP told clients “we expect the rise in repo spreads to unwind in the days ahead, but have no particular insight into how long that will take.”

Fed repo operations take in U.S. Treasury, agency and mortgage bonds from eligible banks in a de facto short-term loan of central-bank cash, collateralized by the bonds. Primary dealers are limited in the amount of liquidity they can take in exchange for their securities, and they pay interest to the central bank to get the funds.

Fed money-market interventions are designed to maintain the fed-funds rate target range. The Fed controls the fed-funds rate to influence the overall cost of borrowing in the U.S. economy as part of its efforts to achieve the job and inflation goals set for it by Congress.

Fed repos had been scheduled to wind down next month, and Treasury bill buying aimed at growing reserves was supposed to be completed sometime in the second quarter. But those plans could change amid the rapidly shifting economic and financial outlook. Some in the market are already wondering if the Fed will increase the size of its temporary operations to accommodate the high level of demand from banks.

Updated: 3-7-2020

Bitcoin Not Affected As US Fed Prints Equivalent of 9.8M BTC In 1 Day

The United States Federal Reserve has funneled the equivalent of half the entire Bitcoin (BTC) supply into the economy — but banks want even more money.

As the New York Fed confirmed on its website, so-called repurchase operations, or “repos,” totalled $89 billion on March 5 alone.

Coronavirus Sparks Liquidity Scum

Repos are designed to provide temporary liquidity to lenders. As Cointelegraph previously noted, the practice is akin to conjuring fiat value out of thin air.

The Fed was reacting to economic weakness in the face of coronavirus, having already cut its interest rate target significantly this month.

Thursday’s liquidity spree was equal in value to approximately 9.8 million BTC — over half the total mined supply.

The overall demand for repo cash in recent weeks has meanwhile exceeded even the Fed’s own limit, the Wall Street Journal added on Friday.

Bitcoin commentators were already quick to sound the alarm over the health of the fiat economy, based on money that has no intrinsic value and which is not backed by any verifiable asset.

“Cut interest rates and print money. These are the tools of central banks,” Morgan Creek Digital co-founder Anthony Pompliano summarized last week.

More Dollars, Not More Value

The coronavirus outbreak has highlighted the systemic instabilities of traditional markets. Stocks have seen historic volatility, while rate decreases and a drop in oil consumption saw many countries’ fiat currencies hemorrhage value.

Such fragility puts “hard” money such as Bitcoin in the spotlight. In a world which uses money with a verifiably limited supply which is impossible to manipulate, there is neither a need for foreign exchange markets, nor for “management” of the economy by central banks.

Bitcoin’s reliable supply means that it has a high stock-to-flow ratio. The creator of an accompanying model using stock-to-flow has shown that it is co-integrated with Bitcoin’s price and that that should, therefore, hit $100,000 at some point in 2021.

Updated: 3-9-2020

New York Fed Repo Totals $112.93 Billion

All repos outstanding rise to $202.9 billion; Fed increases amount of very short-term loans it has been offering to money markets.

Wall Street’s biggest banks took advantage Monday of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s willingness to offer more temporary liquidity to the financial system amid deeply unsettled markets conditions.

Eligible banks, known as primary dealers, tapped $112.93 billion in central-bank liquidity via the New York Fed’s overnight repurchase-agreement operation, or repo. That was up significantly from what the banks sought Friday but was under the newly upsized $150 billion cap the New York Fed has on overnight operations.

Monday’s overnight repo took place as $89.61 billion in repos were maturing from Friday, leading the overall amount of Fed temporary liquidity afforded to markets to rise to $202.9 billion.

Earlier Monday, the New York Fed said that it was increasing the maximum size of its temporary market interventions. With the top size of the overnights rising to $150 billion, longer term repos increased from a $20 billion cap to $45 billion.

The New York Fed’s operation Monday came amid heavy market pressures, as stocks sold off, Treasury yields dove through historic lows and oil prices plunged. The New York Fed said in a statement that its bigger repos “should help support smooth functioning of funding markets as market participants implement business resiliency plans in response to the coronavirus.”

Part of what has been driving increased demand for Fed repos is the broader push into U.S. Treasurys as a safe harbor investments. That has been causing some pressure in money markets rates, although the Fed has had no issue controlling the federal-funds rate level. Some market participants saw the increased repo sizes as a way to calm troubled markets.

“Our sense is that today’s increase is meant to boost confidence and prevent any future tightening in secured funding, rather than counteracting current pressure,” Barclays Capital said in a note.

Increased repo operation sizes weren’t unexpected. In a speech last week, New York Fed leader John Williams, who also serves as vice chairman of the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee, hinted at the looming change, saying the Fed would be “flexible and ready to make adjustments” to make sure “monetary policy is effectively implemented and transmitted to financial markets and the broader economy.”

Fed repo operations take in U.S. Treasury, agency and mortgage bonds from primary dealers in a de facto short-term loan of central-bank cash, collateralized by those securities. Primary dealers have individual limits in the amount of liquidity they can take in exchange for their securities, and they pay interest to the central bank to get the funds.

The Fed has intervened in money markets to maintain the fed-funds rate target range. The Fed controls the fed-funds rate to influence the overall cost of borrowing in the U.S. economy as part of its efforts to achieve the job and inflation goals set for it by Congress. Compared with the 1% and 1.25% fed-funds target rate, the effective fed-funds rate stood at 1.09% on Friday, according to the central bank.

The Fed had been engaged in a process of shrinking the size of repo operations, which restarted in September after nearly a decadelong break. The peak of repo operations happened on Jan. 1, when they hit $255.62 billion, as the Fed flooded markets with liquidity to ensure a smooth transition from 2019 in 2020.

Updated: 3-13-2020

Federal Reserve Accelerates Treasury Purchases to Address Market Strains

Central bank will buy $37 billion in government debt on Friday as pandemic causes disruptions.

The Federal Reserve accelerated previously announced purchases of Treasury securities Friday in a bid to prevent strains in financial markets from worsening despite offers to provide vast sums of short-term loans one day earlier.

On Thursday, the central bank said it would revamp purchases of $80 billion in Treasury securities over the coming month to address rising strains in the Treasury market. Considered the world’s deepest and most-liquid bond market, it has come under pressure as banks and investors react to the implications of a sharp slowdown in economic activity from the coronavirus pandemic.

The Fed announced Friday morning it would make roughly half of those planned purchases, or $37 billion, through the day.

“These purchases are intended to address highly unusual disruptions in the market for Treasury securities associated with the coronavirus outbreak,” the New York Fed, which conducts market operations for the central bank, said Friday morning.

The New York Fed said it intended to accelerate additional planned purchases of Treasury securities “as needed to foster smooth Treasury market functioning and efficient and effective policy implementation.”

Funding disruptions that continued to surface Friday suggested the Fed’s promise on Thursday to provide hundreds of billions of dollars of short-term loans secured by government debt hadn’t fully resolved issues plaguing the Treasury market.

Those disruptions had prompted calls from investors and analysts for the central bank to return to a full-fledged bond-buying campaign, dubbed quantitative easing, to calm funding markets.

Markets this week saw a wave of sales in less recently issued Treasury securities—called “off-the-run” securities—that coupled with broader investor outflows forced markets to absorb a significant amount of bonds in a matter of days, said strategists at Pacific Investment Management Co. in a report Friday.

“The Treasury market is the foundation, the building blocks for the rest of the market, and the foundation is cracked,” said Rick Rieder, chief investment officer of global fixed-income at BlackRock Inc. “What the Fed did was right in every regard.”

On Thursday afternoon, the Fed attempted to alleviate strains by offering up to $1.5 trillion in short-term loans called repurchase agreements, or repo, to financial institutions. Those offerings saw comparatively tepid demand, with the Fed ultimately extending $119.5 billion.

The Fed on Thursday also announced that it would revamp its scheduled purchases of $80 billion in Treasury securities over the next month. Since October, the Fed has been buying $20 billion in securities of varying maturities and $60 billion concentrated in bills, which have maturities of one year or less. On Thursday, the Fed announced it would try to ease funding strains by shifting all $80 billion toward securities across varying maturities.

Readjusting the Fed’s planned purchases “just one day after they released the original calendar is a sign that they are trying to get it right, but they have not yet figured out what is the right thing to do,” said Lou Brien, a market strategist at DRW Trading.

He said it was unlikely the Fed had expected such little take-up from the repo offerings made Thursday.

The mortgage-bond market, which has also experienced disruptions in recent days, appeared to function somewhat better after the Fed’s announcement Friday morning, mortgage lenders said.

While the Fed has committed to purchasing $80 billion in Treasuries this month, it hasn’t said how long those purchases will last, effectively kicking the decision to next week’s meeting of the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee.

Additional asset purchases by the Fed could be needed to avoid additional strains if a larger fiscal-spending package from Congress and the White House advances in the weeks ahead.

Many analysts on Wall Street expect the Fed to cut its benchmark rate, currently in a range of between 1% and 1.25%, to reduce the rate to near zero next week.

But for now, the Fed’s focus has been on addressing the unusual illiquidity in the Treasurys market, which threatens to interfere with everything from hedging trades to setting monetary policy.

Investors and analysts say the Treasury market is being hurt by the extreme volatility in recent sessions, which itself has been compounded by forced selling from fund managers trying to meet redemptions.

Michael Lorizio, a senior trader at Manulife Investment Management, said the price gap between what dealers were willing to buy longer-term Treasurys for and what they were billing to sell them for had only increased Friday morning.

Mr. Lorizio said he had tried to sell some older bonds with near 30-year maturities and found the price dealers were willing to buy them for was lower than what was indicated on his computer screen, a sign of market illiquidity.

Many funds that include a mix of riskier assets, like investment-grade bonds or stocks, along with Treasurys are experiencing large outflows. In response, some managers appear to be selling Treasurys because, even under these circumstances, they are still easier to offload than those other assets.

Liquidity in longer-term Treasurys and those issued some time ago is particularly poor because there is already less demand for those bonds, traders say. The prices of longer-term bonds also go up and down more for any given amount of change in their yield, making them riskier to hold.

While Wall Street has been operating in split locations this past week due to worries about the coronavirus pandemic, concerns escalated about more employees working from home. Morgan Stanley unexpectedly sent home employees on its trading floor on Thursday, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Hedge funds and asset managers were selling bonds and unwinding positions aggressively Thursday in anticipation of potential dealer shutdowns or disruptions as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a state of emergency that could put the financial center on lockdown.

“We are in this unusual time with people in different locations, and liquidity hasn’t been great,” said Mr. Rieder of BlackRock.

Government bond purchases could help alleviate strains from two long-running trades that have become very expensive in recent days: The “basis trade,” which seeks to exploit pricing gaps between Treasury securities and futures, and “risk parity funds,” which try to score strong performance with moderate risk using futures contracts that can boost the returns of low-risk assets.

On Thursday morning, Bank of America warned clients that the unwind of several trading strategies that rely heavily on borrowed money risked creating “a cascading effect whereby U.S. Treasury yields rise sharply and force liquidations from other similar investors.”

Thanks to the disruption of short-term funding, securities dealers could be left with $300 billion of 30-year Treasurys on their books whose ultimate sale would cause U.S. Treasury yields to rise sharply, potentially forcing further unwinds and worsening conditions throughout financial markets, analysts at Bank of America and JPMorgan said.

Updated: 3-15-2020

QE4 Begins: Fed Cuts Rates, Buys $700B In Bonds; Bitcoin Rallies 7.7%

The Federal Reserve decided it had to act quickly and severely to cut rates on Sunday, slashing the target fed fund rates — the interest depository institutions charge one another overnight for reserves — to between 0.0 and 0.25 percent.

The full percentage point cut was four times more than its usual move.

The Fed’s return to ZIRP — zero interest rate policy — was brought about by the threat coronavirus is placing on the U.S. and global economy. It was done at the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) meeting, which was urgently moved up to Sunday from a previously scheduled one on Tuesday.

The last time rates were cut to this level was Dec. 2008, where it remained for seven years. It inched up as high as 2.5 percent by 2018, before the Fed began cutting. Just two weeks ago, it was brought down to 1.0 to 1.25 percent.

“The coronavirus outbreak has harmed communities and disrupted economic activity in many countries, including the United States,” the FOMC said in its statement. “Global financial conditions have also been significantly affected. Available economic data show that the U.S. economy came into this challenging period on a strong footing.”

All but one member of the FOMC voted for the cut. The lone holdout, Cleveland Fed President Loretta J. Mester, agreed with the idea of cutting rates but wanted the range to be a little higher, between one-half and three-quarters percent.

Not only did the Fed cut rates, it also decided to start buying $500 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds and $200 billion mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Doing so has the effect of adding more dollars into the economy by taking the bonds off of banks’ balance sheets and putting loanable cash in their stead. It also lowers interest rates; bond yields fall as bond prices rise, which happens when massive buying like this occurs.

Effectively, this is “QE4,” the fourth major round of quantitative easing by the American central bank since the global financial crisis a little more than a decade ago.

This will bring total assets on the Federal Reserves balance up to a record $5 trillion.

Over the past week, the Fed also announced it was going to do a total of $1.5 trillion in repurchase agreements (repos and reverse repos) lasting up to three months to make short-term money available to banks to meet reserve requirements and keep the fed funds rate on target.

News of the FOMC’s action sent U.S. stocks into a tailspin, giving back a chunk the gains they eked out in the last trading hours on Friday. Futures trading on the Dow Jones Industrial Average was halted Sunday evening when prices fell 5 percent, triggering market “circuit breakers.”

Updated: 3-16-2020

Fed Repo Demand Registers Limited Interest

Fed offers second repo operation with a $500 billion cap on Monday even as its earlier foray registered limited interest.

The morning after the Federal Reserve fired most of its available weapons to help the economy navigate the coronavirus threat, demand for its temporary liquidity again fell well short of what the central bank was willing to provide, amid a choppy morning for money-market rates.

On Monday, the Fed offered eligible banks three repurchase agreement operations, or repos. In the one-day interventions, so-called primary dealers sought $129.6 billion in loans versus the $175 billion the Fed was willing to provide.

There were also two Fed’s repo operations with $500 billion caps. The first runs until April 13 and garnered modest demand, with dealers taking $18.45 billion, while the second one-day mega repo was also massively underbid at $19.4 billion.

The second of the Fed’s two mega-sized repos was unexpected and came amid a short-term surge in money markets—most notably in the repo sector where firms borrow and lend cash and Treasurys short-term. In announcing its action, the Fed said it was taking action “to ensure that the supply of reserves remains ample and to support the smooth functioning of short-term U.S. dollar funding markets.”

Jon Hill, a strategist at BMO Capital Markets, said key money market rates have been “very volatile” on Monday and he was optimistic that “introducing a second [operation] later in the day could help some primary dealers clean up funding for positions.”

Scott Skyrm, executive vice president in fixed income and repo at Curvature Securities., said the repo market pressure was ultimately short-lived. “The repo market had a little panic” around 9:30 a.m. ET. He noted overnight borrowing rates jumped to as high as 2.50% but fell back to 0.25%, which he said is “where they should be.” Mr. Skrym said “tensions are high and when cash doesn’t flow in the market right away, trades get panicky,” which leads rates to rise.

After lowering rates on Sunday, the new federal-funds rate target range is 0% to 0.25%. The federal-funds rate should trade within that range and market-based short-term rates just above it.

Fed repo operations take in Treasurys, mortgages and agency securities from primary dealers in what are effectively collateralized loans from the central bank. The operations are aimed at controlling the federal-funds rate, the central bank’s primary tool for achieving its inflation and job mandates. Repos are a very long-running tool for the Fed, and dealers accessing the loans pay interest and face individual limits for what they can borrow.

The Fed’s repo interventions on Monday followed a historic Sunday evening for the central bank. To protect the economy and financial system against coronavirus risks, the central bank slashed its overnight interest rate target to effectively zero, announced a major expansion of its bond-buying efforts and tweaked bank-oversight rules—harkening back to its actions during the financial crisis.

Last week, the Fed increased its repo offerings three times in a bid to help improve troubled functioning in the bond market. While the Fed massively upsized the amount of money it was willing to loan markets, dealers didn’t show up in force to take it.

Part of that was because primary dealers aren’t in position to fully exploit the Fed loans, but there are also other issues. The overall amount of Fed temporary liquidity on Monday ticked down to $317.9 billion from $344.6 billion on Friday.

In his conference call with reporters after the Fed acted on Sunday, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said the relatively modest demand on its massively expanded repo operations spurred the Fed to expand its bond buying.

Updated: 10-6-2020

$9 Trillion In Stimulus Injections: The Fed’s 2020 Pump Eclipses Two Centuries of USD Creation

Since September 2019, research shows the Federal Reserve has pumped over $9 trillion to primary dealers by leveraging enormous emergency repo operations. A recently published investigative report shows the U.S. central bank submits the daily loan tally, but the Fed will not provide the public with information concerning the recipients. Estimates say, in 2020 alone, the U.S. has created 22% of all the USD issued since the birth of the nation.

The U.S. Federal Reserve has printed massive amounts of funds in 2020 and bailed out Wall Street’s special interests during the last seven months. On October 3, 2020, Redditors from the subreddit r/btc shared a video called “Is Hyperinflation Coming?” and discussed how the U.S. central bank has created 22% of all the USD ever printed this year alone.

“The U.S. dollar has been around for over 200 years and for the bulk of that time, it was backed by gold,” one Reddit user wrote on Saturday. He added:

Having a quarter of all USD printed in a single year is more than alarming, it’s mind-blowing.

Additionally, on October 1, 2020, Wall Street on Parade’s (WSP) Pam Martens and Russ Martens published a comprehensive report on how the U.S. central bank pumped out “more than $9 trillion in bailouts since September.” The findings show that the Fed is also getting market advice from Wall Street hedge funds like Frontpoint. The hedge fund Frontpoint Partners is a controversial firm because it shorted the subprime mortgage market during the 2007 to 2010 financial crisis.

The latest WSP analysis shows that the Fed has been “conducting meetings with hedge funds” like Frontpoint in order to get the financial institution’s “input on the markets.” In 2007 to 2010, the Fed was leading a group of lending facilities and once again the central bank is working with three major emergency lending facilities: the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility; the Primary Dealer Credit Facility; and the Commercial Paper Funding Facility.

“On top of those facilities, beginning on September 17, 2019 – months before the first case of Covid-19 was reported in the United States – the New York Fed embarked on a massive emergency repo loan operation, which had reached $6 trillion cumulatively in loans by January 6,” the WSP findings detail. The Martens’ also state:

The Fed has provided data on the total amounts of the daily loans, but not the names of the recipients. All it will say is that the loans are going to its 24 primary dealers, which are the trading units of the big banks on Wall Street. The last time we tallied its data in March, it had sluiced over $9 trillion cumulatively to these trading houses.

A number of people believe that the massive creation of money stemming from the Fed will eventually cause hyperinflation. The dollar has lost considerable value since the introduction of the central bank in 1913. For instance, the cumulative rate of inflation since 1913 is around 2,525.4%. This means a product purchased for $1 in 1913 would cost $26.25 in October 2020.

Precious metals and cryptocurrency proponents believe the central bank’s pumping will bolster assets like bitcoin and gold. Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead explained in July that the company believes cryptocurrencies like bitcoin (BTC) will help people with the gloomy economic outcome.

“The United States printed more money in June than in the first two centuries after its founding,” Morehead wrote in a letter to investors. “Last month the U.S. budget deficit — $864 billion — was larger than the total debt incurred from 1776 through the end of 1979.”

On the same day Pantera Capital published the letter called “Two Centuries Of Debt In One Month,” the 22-year congressional veteran, Ron Paul, told the public that Americans should be “prepared.”

Paul has exposed the U.S. Federal Reserve for the last two decades and has written extensively about the central bank’s fraud. In the video, the former congressional leader said the medical community, U.S. bureaucrats, and the Fed have done things he never expected.

“After so many years in Washington, I thought I was immune to being shocked by what our government does,” Paul detailed. “But the actions that our elected officials… the Fed… even the medical community have taken in the past few weeks have gone beyond anything I could have imagined.”

“Most Americans will be blindsided by what’s going to happen. Make sure you, your family, and anyone you care about are prepared,” the former U.S. Presidential candidate insisted.

Meanwhile, the U.S. airline industry is looking for a second bailout, three days ago the number of the country’s mortgages involved in the bailout program spiked by 21,000, the hotel industry is looking for stimulus, and President Trump recently revealed a multi-billion dollar farm bailout.

Updated: 11-25-2020

Fed Signals New Guidance Coming On Asset-Purchase Program

Ways that purchases could be changed to provide more stimulus to the economy, if needed, were discussed.

Federal Reserve officials this month discussed plans to provide more information about how long they will keep purchasing Treasury and mortgage-backed securities by linking the time frame for the stimulus program to economic conditions.

Minutes of the Nov 4-5 meeting released Wednesday showed officials were prepared to roll out the revised guidance as soon as their next meeting, set for Dec. 15-16. They also discussed ways that the purchases could be altered to provide more stimulus to the economy, if needed. But they didn’t indicate any imminent changes in that direction.

Whether the Fed takes any of those additional steps next month could depend on how the economy and financial markets weather rising virus infections and the removal, at the end of the year, of emergency lending programs established by the Fed and the Treasury Department.

Since June, the Fed has been buying $80 billion a month in Treasurys and $40 billion in mortgage securities, net of redemptions, and its rate-setting committee said in its policy statement that those purchases would continue “over coming months.”

“Many participants judged that the committee might want to enhance its guidance for asset purchases fairly soon,” the minutes said.

In September, the Fed provided guidance about its interest-rate plans by laying out three economic conditions that would need to be met before it raised rates from near zero. The Fed said it would hold rates at that level until the labor market is healed, inflation hits 2% and inflation is projected to run moderately above 2%.

Similar guidance for the asset purchases could say, for example, that the central bank won’t reduce the pace until the pandemic has passed, or until officials are satisfied that they are on track to meet those other conditions. Most officials thought the guidance should imply that they would slow the pace of bond purchases before beginning to raise short-term interest rates, the minutes said.

At their meeting this month, officials said it would be important for the new guidance around asset purchases to be consistent with the September guidance around interest rates “so that the use of these tools would be well coordinated,” the minutes said. A few officials said they were hesitant to make the change soon because the economic outlook was so uncertain.

Fed officials are navigating an outlook clouded by the risk that the economic recovery slows in the winter months amid rising coronavirus cases. At the same time, positive developments about vaccine trials raises the prospect of a stronger rebound later in 2021.

Central banks took aggressive actions earlier this year after the virus upended daily life and forced curbs on economic activity that had no precedent in peacetime.

The Fed cut its benchmark rate to near zero in March and bought tens of billions of Treasurys and mortgage securities a day to unclog dysfunctional markets. It gradually slowed the pace of the purchases until June, when it fixed the monthly volumes at their current level.

The Fed also unveiled an array of emergency lending programs in the spring in partnership with the Treasury Department, which provided $195 billion in money set aside by Congress to backstop loan losses.

Last week, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the programs were no longer needed, that the money would be better spent on other aid that Congress hasn’t agreed to approve and that he lacked the authority to extend the programs beyond December—provoking an unusual split with the Fed, which had pressed for an extension.

The Fed wanted to maintain the lending programs as a backstop in the face of threats posed by the coronavirus pandemic. “A few participants noted that it was important to extend them beyond year-end,” the minutes said.

Officials were briefed by staff economists about ways to provide more support for the economy by adjusting the asset purchases. One possibility would be to shift the composition of Treasury purchases toward longer-dated securities, as the Fed did during its 2012-14 bond-buying program.

A second option would call for increasing the quantity of monthly purchases and a third would conduct purchases of the same pace and composition over a longer time horizon.

Officials discussed a fourth option in which the Fed would increase the share of long-term holdings while decreasing the overall pace of purchases, but they said such a change would be tricky to communicate because it could feed the false impression that the Fed was choosing to reduce the amount of support provided to the economy.

The minutes didn’t indicate a clear consensus for any particular change, but they said several officials saw limits to the potency of their asset purchases given the low level of long-term Treasury yields.

“Going forward, as we watch how the economy is evolving, how the outlook is evolving, we can think about any adjustments we want to make on those purchases,” New York Fed President John Williams said in an interview Tuesday. “I think they’re serving their purposes really well right now.”

Fed policy in the past decade has been guided by the theory that holding long-term securities stimulates financial markets and the economy by holding down long-term interest rates. That is thought to drive investors into riskier assets like stocks and corporate bonds and encourage business investment and consumer spending. Holding short-term securities, this theory holds, provides little stimulus.

The idea was at the core of former Chairman Ben Bernanke’s strategy to move the Fed’s holdings heavily into long-term Treasury bonds after the 2008 financial crisis. Fed estimates suggest the strategy lowered long-term interest rates by a full percentage point, making it less costly for millions of homeowners, car buyers, corporations and governments to borrow.

“We may reach a view at some point that we need to do more,” said Fed Chairman Jerome Powell at a Nov. 5 news conference. But he indicated comfort for now with the current program, which he described repeatedly as large.

Fed officials saw signs of better-than-expected economic improvement as households had built up a larger pool of savings during the pandemic, which could provide more momentum to consumer spending. Most officials saw the risk that insufficient government spending to cushion hard-hit households, businesses, cities and states would lead to a pace of weaker growth, the minutes said.

In their economic briefing prepared for the meeting, Fed staff removed from their outlook the assumption of additional spending from Congress and the White House given the lack of progress in reaching a new agreement.

Although the lack of new spending would cause “significant hardships for a number of households,” the economists judged that the savings cushion accumulated by other households this year would be enough to maintain overall spending over the next few months.

While reduced spending would lead to less demand over the medium-term, economists projected that state and local government funding woes would be less of a drag than previously anticipated due to new data on tax receipts.

As a result, the staff forecast expected the unemployment rate to continue to decline and inflation to gradually rise, moderately overshooting the Fed’s 2% target for “some time” after 2023, assuming that monetary policy provides continued support to the economy.

A separate briefing on financial markets warned that vulnerabilities associated with household and business borrowing were “notable,” and some Fed officials said their business contacts reported that many households and businesses were in a weaker position to weather additional economic shocks than they had at the beginning of the pandemic in March.

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