Kamis, 19 September 2019

Fed's Powell: No Negative Interest Rates at Next Crisis - WOLF STREET

The Fed has different priorities than the ECB, the Bank of Japan, the Swiss National Bank, et al.

During the press conference today following the FOMC meeting, Fed chair Jerome Powell was asked if and when the Fed would push its policy interest rate into the negative. Powell did not respond with his usual, “we will act as appropriate.” He had a real answer.

For months, there has been clamoring from Wall Street and speculators, and from the White House, that the Fed should or would cut its policy rates into the negative. Peak of the negative-interest-rate momentum was likely in late August or early September.

Since then, longer term yields have risen across the board, and a substantial part of the $17 trillion in negative yielding debt has turned into slightly positive-yielding debt. So maybe folks are worried that the negative interest rate era is coming to an untimely end, and they want the Fed to step in and save the day.

At the post-FOMC meeting press conference, negative interest rate policy (NIRP) came up in the context of the Fed’s blowing its firepower with these rate cuts before there is even a recession; and then not having much firepower left when that recession arrives. Powell was asked directly about it: Is there “any scenario in which you would envision rates drifting lower into negative territory, and are there any other tools that you could use before having to go there?”

And Powell replied:

“Negative interest rates is something that we looked at during the financial crisis and chose not to do. After we got to the effective lower bound [near-zero effective federal funds rate], we chose to do a lot of aggressive forward guidance and also large-scale asset purchases.

“Those were the two unconventional monetary policy tools that we used extensively. We feel that they worked fairly well.

“We did not use negative rates. And if we were to find ourselves at some future date again at the effective lower bound – not something we are expecting – then I think we would look at using large-scale asset purchases and forward guidance.

“I do not think we’d be looking at using negative rates.”

So negative interest rates are not happening. Over the years, other Fed officials have expressed their unwillingness to deploy negative interest rates as well – and for good reason.

Negative interest rates are even worse than near-zero interest rates. They have not proven to be beneficial for the economy anywhere where they’re currently in operation, and they entail seriously destructive side effects for the people and the banking system in the country.

However, negative interest rates as follow-up and addition to massive QE were effective in keeping the Eurozone glued together because they allowed countries to stay afloat that cannot, but would need to, print their own money to stay afloat. They did so by making funding plentiful and nearly free, or free, or more than free.

This includes Italian government debt, which has a negative yield through three-year maturities. The Italian 10-year yield is only 0.9%, rather than 7% or 8%, as it was during the Debt Crisis, when Italy was approaching a default, like Greece had already done. The ECB’s latest rate cut, minuscule and controversial as it was, was designed to help out Italy further so it wouldn’t have to abandon the euro and break out of the Eurozone.

The US doesn’t need negative interest rates to stay glued together. It can print its own money.

In Switzerland, Denmark, and some other countries, negative yields are used as blatant currency manipulation, to push down their currencies. That would be tempting for the US as well, but then there is a price to pay – as we can see from the economic doldrums and the banking fiasco in Europe and Japan.

Negative yields have been another blow for the European and Japanese banks hobbling from crisis to crisis, their shares wobbling along multi-decade lows. Negative yields are the final blow for pension and retirement systems. Negative yields distort the pricing of risk, and therefore distort the cost of capital and lead to business decisions that would otherwise be idiotic waste and malinvestment. This is an issue that is already playing out with low interest rates – such as share buybacks funded with borrowed money – and it gets a lot worse with negative interest rates.

The Fed is the guardian of the banks and has been created for the banks. The 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks are owned by the financial institutions in their respective districts. And a monetary policy that is damaging to the banks, undermines the banking system, and puts bank shareholders at risk of massive losses is just basic anathema to the Fed. Powell wasn’t the first one to just say no to NIPP, but he said clearly.

The 10-year Treasury yield rips. Unstoppable negative yields become stoppable. Read…  THE WOLF STREET REPORT: Snapback Bloodletting in the Overripe Bond Market

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https://wolfstreet.com/2019/09/18/feds-powell-says-no-to-negative-interest-rates-at-next-recession/

2019-09-19 04:32:20Z
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Rabu, 18 September 2019

Instant view: U.S. fed funds rate breaks above Fed's target range - Reuters

(Reuters) - A key interest rates the Federal Reserve aims to influence to control monetary policy broke above the top-end of the central bank’s target range for the first time since the global credit crisis more than a decade ago.

The effective or average interest rate on what banks charge each other to borrow reserves overnight rose to 2.30% on Tuesday, above the Fed’s current target range of 2.00%-2.25%, New York Federal Reserve data showed.

WILLIE DELWICHE, INVESTMENT STRATEGIST, BAIRD, MILWAUKEE

“It’s probably nothing. It’s probably the sort of seasonal, technical sorts of things that people are using to explain it away. But there is a risk that there is some trouble in the monetary plumbing in the economy.”

“If you step back, Fed easing for the most part was extremely experimental. This tightening phase has been extremely experimental. You don’t realize what is going on until you are actually in it, and you start to see some of this stuff and that could be what’s going on.”

“I’d be more reassured by it if someone was saying, ‘Hey, this might happen,’ it happened and then people say, ‘But don’t worry about the rest of it, it’s going to be fine.’ Instead, it’s something that was a surprise and people are quick to say, ‘It’s no big deal.’ You weren’t anticipating it in the first place, so then how can you say there’s no other problems that are going to come after it?”

KEN POLCARI, MANAGING PRINCIPAL, BUTCHER JOSEPH ASSET MANAGEMENT, NEW YORK

“I wouldn’t say everyone got up in a panic the way they did, remember two weeks ago — the minute the 10-year inverted there was this panic. I wouldn’t be so panicky today based on what happened last night. But it speaks of maybe a broader underlying trend that may be developing, so in order to not lose control the Fed is going to have to stay on top of that. I don’t believe it is a signal of concern, I think it is an aberration. The Fed is constantly doing those overnight repos, it is part of what they do to help fund the system. A lot of that was driven by the huge tax payments that came due and big corporation had to pay so, therefore, that was part of the reason and that makes perfect sense. Which is why I wouldn’t necessarily be raising the alarm bells going, ‘oh my God this is over,’ I don’t think that is the case. Nor do I think the Fed is losing control, but that being said, if this continues, if tomorrow is the same thing, the next day is the same thing then I would say there is more under the hood but I wouldn’t say that right now.

“We are still much closer to the highs than not and therefore today’s announcement that they are cutting rates by 25 basis points could actually produce that buy-the-rumor, sell-the-news report. Because they took the market right back up to the highs, now they are going to announce it so it wouldn’t surprise me to see the market get hit today as people take the profits over the past couple of days.”

MICHAEL SKORDELES, U.S. MACRO STRATEGIST, SUNTRUST ADVISORY SERVICES, ATLANTA

“The big takeaway is it’s not a big issue. A lot of companies had parked funds in money markets, but with the expectation of the Fed continuing to lower rates, why keep it in money markets if it’s going to be parked a little while longer? Why did the Fed have to step in? They used to always do it. But since there has been so much liquidity sloshing around, there wasn’t much need. Now that rates are moving downward and people are moving funds around, rather than parking them in money markets, there’s an opportunity to have a mismatch in funds. Our view is that it’s fairly straightforward and not that big of a deal. We’re not seeing the signs of stress that some people are ascribing to it.”

“This (jump in the fed funds rate) is lock, stock and barrel the same mismatch of funds in the money market (pushing up) the fed funds rate.”

SUBADRA RAJAPPA, HEAD OF U.S. RATES STRATEGY, SOCIETE GENERALE, NEW YORK

“It adds the uncertainty, the repo market is $1 trillion plus and when you start seeing funding stresses of this magnitude it signals that it’s probably demand for reserves.”

“The question really becomes how is the Fed going to make sure we don’t have this volatility in the repo markets, and reacting to it with the repo facility and making cash available for traders. The question is should they be doing more? With the spike in effective fed funds will that mean they will be cutting IOER, and also they could potentially introduce a standing repo facility which they have discussed in the past, or they can start organically growing their balance sheet.”

“I think it’s a bit premature to either grow the balance sheet or introduce a standing repo facility, but we might get a little bit more color in the press conference from Chair Powell.”

LOU CRANDALL, CHIEF ECONOMIST, WRIGHTSON ICAP LLC, NEW YORK

“The fed funds rate is a sideshow when you have seen all the volatility in the repo rate. Yes it’s above the top end of the Fed’s target range. It was 5 basis points out of the range. It’s a pretty small miss.”

Compiled by Alden Bentley

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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-repo-reaction-instant-view/instant-view-us-fed-funds-rate-breaks-above-feds-target-range-idUSKBN1W31TW

2019-09-18 13:56:00Z
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What's moving markets today: Live updates - CNN

Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has spent a year messaging confidence to investors in the heavily coded language of central bankers, and last month finally gave President Donald Trump the rate cut he'd been demanding for months.

Now Powell has a much tougher audience: American shoppers.

The thing keeping the US economy afloat despite Trump's ongoing trade wars and contractions overseas is consumer spending, which has stayed strong despite a slew of negative headlines -- a federal budget deficit topping $1 trillion, bond markets sending signals of a looming recession and now an oil shock in Saudi Arabia.

But any slip, especially heading into the holiday season, could mean the difference between a gentle slowdown and a full-blown recession.

"The one aspect of the US economy that's really holding up well is the consumer, and if the consumer gets freaked out and clutches the pocketbook tighter then a downturn becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy," Greg McBride, chief financial analyst for Bankrate.com told CNN.

Read more here.

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https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/stock-market-news-today-091819/index.html

2019-09-18 10:35:00Z
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WeWork CEO Adam Neumann told employees he's 'humbled' by the collapse of the firm's IPO - Business Insider

adam neumann wework we company ceoAdam Neumann, CEO of The We Company.AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

WeWork cofounder and CEO Adam Neumann told employees he was "humbled" by the collapse of the company's IPO this week.

In an internal webcast hours after the shared-workspace provider delayed its stock-market listing, Neumann said he had lessons to learn about running a public company, according to the Financial Times. He also voiced regret over how the listing process was handled, the newspaper said, citing people who saw the presentation.

Neumann's larger-than-life personality played a "huge role" in the listing's failure, the Financial Times reported, citing someone who worked closely with him. Fears of emulating the disappointing public debuts of Uber, Lyft, and other disruptive businesses this year factored into Neumann's decision to postpone WeWork's IPO, people close to the cofounder told the newspaper.

Neumann and two other WeWork executives vowed to employees the IPO would go through later this year, but the company could be forced to delay its public debut until next year, people briefed on the matter told the Financial Times. WeWork was expected to drum up interest in its shares during an investor roadshow this week, before listing them on the Nasdaq index next week.

Investors grew disillusioned with WeWork's unclear path to profitability, business model, complex structure, hefty valuation, and controversial governance. The group slashed its targeted public valuation to below $20 billion — less than half the $47 billion private valuation it secured in January — and introduced new limits on Neumann's control of the company, stock sales, real-estate deals, and succession plans, but failed to win enough support.

WeWork hopes a fresh set of quarterly financials for the three months to September will help it to revive its IPO next month, according to Reuters, citing people familiar with the company's thinking. However, investor demand could prove lackluster as fund managers become more conservative and look to protect their gains in the fourth quarter, Reuters said.

WeWork must raise at least $3 billion through an IPO this year, or it will lose out on a $6 billion credit line tied to that milestone, forcing it to seek alternative financing.

Exclusive FREE Slide Deck: 10 Up and Coming Fintechs by Business Insider Intelligence

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https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-ipo-ceo-adam-neumann-humbled-by-delayed-public-listing-2019-9

2019-09-18 09:25:42Z
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Trump shoves the Fed into new territory - POLITICO

President Donald Trump & Jerome Powell

President Donald Trump has called Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell 'clueless.' | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

President Donald Trump has taken over Jerome Powell’s life.

The Federal Reserve’s expected decision on Wednesday to cut interest rates again will spark new questions about whether Powell, its chairman, is caving to intense public pressure by Trump. While Powell strongly rejects that notion, the president’s policies have clearly forced the central bank’s hand.

Story Continued Below

The Fed, which last December was considering hiking interest rates at least twice this year, has done a head-spinning turn since then in response to weakening business investment, a contraction in manufacturing and a global slowdown — all fueled by Trump’s trade wars.

And the president’s abrupt decision last year to pull out of the Iran nuclear accord arguably set off a steady deterioration in relations that today has made Middle East tensions another threat to economic growth that the Fed must take into account.

Trump is forcing still more dramatic policy options into the limelight — including his latest call on the Fed to cut rates below zero, an idea that the central bank has long resisted as an avenue for fighting recessions.

“I’ve always thought the Fed has been a little bit slow to control the narrative about monetary policy,” said Seth Carpenter, chief U.S. economist at Swiss bank UBS and a former Fed official. “Throw Trump into the mix, and you’re in a completely different circumstance where he does like to drive the narrative.

“You just end up being dragged around,” he said.

The Fed has repeatedly pointed to trade tensions, slowing global growth and muted inflation as its main reasons for lowering rates, a move intended to support the economy as recession fears have begun to creep into the Treasury bond market.

But the economy is still growing, with consumer spending powering it forward and the labor market continuing to add jobs, suggesting some room for optimism about the future of the expansion, the longest in U.S. history.

The Fed has remained reticent to share details about its plans as it closely monitors the complicated economic picture. After the central bank lowered rates in July — its first cut in more than a decade — Powell suggested that the Fed wasn’t yet embarking on a full-blown cutting cycle. But markets are expecting several more reductions between now and early next year and will be watching the chairman closely for signals on that front.

But those decisions will be driven, at least in part, by the outcome of the U.S.-China trade war, meaning the Fed, like the rest of Washington, will continue to keep an eye on Trump’s Twitter storms.

Against that backdrop, Trump tweets, often daily, that the Fed is clueless and that if it would only slash rates by a large amount, the economy would take off like a “rocket ship.”

“The United States, because of the Federal Reserve, is paying a MUCH higher Interest Rate than other competing countries,” the president tweeted on Monday. “They can’t believe how lucky they are that Jay Powell & the Fed don’t have a clue,” he added, calling for a “Big Interest Rate Drop.”

His recent attempt to push the Fed to pursue negative interest rates — a move tried in Europe and Japan with unclear results — demonstrates the shift in who is controlling the narrative around the Fed.

A decade ago, the central bank pursued a range of new and untested policies to jump-start the economy — such as purchasing trillions of dollars in government bonds — and faced challenges in getting the public on board. Now, while the pursuit of negative rates in the U.S. would still be highly controversial, Trump is the one driving the conversation toward unconventional policies.

“There’s no escaping the president’s bully pulpit, no matter what it is he’s talking about, not the least when it comes in the form of a tweet where it gets promoted and dissected,” said Sarah Binder, a political science professor at George Washington University. “It focuses media attention. It focuses public attention.”

Trump has also urged the Fed to help him more directly fight his trade wars, focusing much of his frustration on the heft of the dollar, whose strength makes U.S. exports more expensive.

He has gone from suggesting the central bank cut its main borrowing rate by a whole percentage point — the equivalent of four standard cuts — to now calling for rates of “ZERO, or less,” which would mean lowering rates by at least 2 percentage points.

“He certainly is the big elephant in the room,” Binder said.

“If part of [Fed] communications is telling markets and the public and businesses where you’re headed, and if people wonder where they’re headed because the president has now injected himself into the debate … then that kind of undermines the whole use of communications as the central tool” of monetary policy, she added.

As for the Fed’s ultimate decisions on rates, Carpenter said he believes central bank officials when they insist that they do not discuss the political implications of their decisions at their policy meetings. But, he said, the pressure likely makes them more cautious.

“Their lives are just made that much more complicated by having to second-guess themselves, and saying, ‘OK, now we’ve made a decision, let’s ask ourselves one more time, are we sure we’re doing this for the right reasons?‘”

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https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/18/trump-federal-reserve-jerome-powell-interest-rates-1500930

2019-09-18 09:02:00Z
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Fed Preps Second Blast of Cash With Repo Market Still on Edge - Investing.com

(Bloomberg) -- It had been more than a decade since Federal Reserve traders jumped into U.S. money markets to inject cash. And they seemed to get the reaction they wanted Tuesday morning, instantaneously driving down key short-term rates that had spiked to as high as 10% and threatened 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 to the market. Overnight repurchase rates were being quoted at around 4% for Wednesday morning, according to Jefferies.

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 fund 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.”

A couple of catalysts caused the squeeze in repo liquidity. 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 what, if anything, the Fed might do to fix the situation for good.

“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 one deployed Tuesday and planned for 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. That means 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 something called the interest rate on excess reserves on Wednesday, an attempt bring markets back 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 the market shifting through time to a new set of realities.”

(Adds Wednesday’s repo rate quote in third paragraph)

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https://www.investing.com/news/economy/fed-preps-second-blast-of-cash-with-repo-market-still-on-edge-1980405

2019-09-18 05:40:00Z
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Explainer: The Fed has a repo problem. What's that? - Reuters

(Reuters) - As if the U.S. Federal Reserve didn’t already have enough on its plate heading into its meeting on interest rates this week, chaos deep inside the plumbing of the U.S. financial system has thrown policymakers an unexpected curveball.

FILE PHOTO: Federal Reserve Board building on Constitution Avenue is pictured in Washington, U.S., March 19, 2019. REUTERS/Leah Millis/File Photo

Cash available to banks for their short-term funding needs all but dried up on Monday and Tuesday, and interest rates in U.S. money markets shot up to as high as 10% for some overnight loans, more than four times the Fed’s rate.

That forced the Fed to make an emergency injection of more than $50 billion, its first since the financial crisis more than a decade ago, to prevent borrowing costs from spiraling even higher. It will conduct another one on Wednesday.

The exact cause of the squeeze is a matter of some debate, but most market participants agree that two coincidental events on Monday were at least partly to blame. First, corporations had to withdraw funds from money market accounts to pay for quarterly tax bills, and then on the same day the banks and investors who bought the $78 billion of U.S. Treasury notes and bonds sold by Uncle Sam last week had to settle up.

On top of that, the reserves that banks park with the Fed and are often made available to other banks on an overnight basis are at their lowest since 2011 thanks to the central bank’s culling of its vast portfolio of bonds over the past few years.

Added together, these factors are testing the limits of the $2.2 trillion repurchase agreement - or repo - market, a gray but essential component of the U.S. financial system.

Whatever the cause, the episode has added fuel to the argument that the Fed needs to take steps to avoid more disruptions in the repo market down the road.

(GRAPHIC - U.S. repo rate, here)

WHY IS THE REPO MARKET IMPORTANT?

The repo market underpins much of the U.S. financial system, helping to ensure banks have the liquidity to meet their daily operational needs and maintain sufficient reserves.

In a repo trade, Wall Street firms and banks offer U.S. Treasuries and other high-quality securities as collateral to raise cash, often overnight, to finance their trading and lending activities. The next day, borrowers repay their loans plus what is typically a nominal rate of interest and get their bonds back. In other words, they repurchase, or repo, the bonds.

The system typically hums along with the interest rate charged on repo deals hovering close to the Fed’s benchmark overnight rate, currently set in a range of 2.00% to 2.25%. That rate is expected to be cut by a quarter percentage point on Wednesday.

But sometimes, investors get fearful of lending, as seen during the global credit crisis, or at other times there are just not enough reserves or cash in the system to lend out, as appeared to be the case this week. And that can cause a squeeze on the market and send borrowing costs zooming higher.

But when investors get fearful of lending, as seen during the global credit crisis, or when there are just not enough reserves or cash in the system to lend out, it sends the repo rate soaring above the Fed Funds rate.

Trading in stocks and bonds can become difficult. It can also pinch lending to businesses and consumers and, if the disruption is prolonged, it can become a drag on a U.S. economy that relies heavily on the flow of credit.

WHAT HAS CAUSED THE DROP IN BANK RESERVES?

Coming out of the financial crisis, after the Fed cut interest rates to near zero and bought more than $3.5 trillion of bonds, banks built up massive reserves held at the Fed.

But that level of bank reserves, which peaked at nearly $2.8 trillion, began falling when the Fed started raising interest rates in late 2015. They fell even faster when the Fed started to cut the size of its bond portfolio about two years later.

The Fed stopped raising interest rates last year and cut them in July and is expected to do so again on Wednesday. It has also now ceased allowing to bonds to roll off its balance sheet.

The question vexing policymakers now is whether those actions are enough to stop the downward drift in reserves, which are a main source of liquidity in funding markets like repo.

Bank reserves at the Fed last stood at $1.47 trillion, the lowest level since 2011 and nearly 50% below their peak from five years ago.

(GRAPHIC - Bank excess reserves held at the Fed,

here)

1. RUN SPOT REPO OPERATIONS

Through the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Fed can conduct occasional spot repo operations at times of funding stress, allowing banks and dealers to swap their Treasuries and other high-quality securities for cash at a minimal interest rate. It did this on Tuesday and will do it again on Wednesday.

2. LOWER THE INTEREST IT PAYS ON EXCESS RESERVES

By making it less profitable for banks, especially foreign ones, to leave their reserves at the Fed, it may encourage banks to lend to each other in money markets.

3. CREATE A STANDING REPO FACILITY

Such a permanent financing program will allow eligible participants to exchange their bonds for cash at a set interest rate.

Fed and its staff have considered such a facility, but they have not determined who qualifies, what would be the level of interest paid and the timing for a possible launch.

4. RAMP UP BUYING OF TREASURIES

The Fed can replenish the level of bank reserves by slightly increasing its holdings of U.S. government debt. This comes with the risk that it may be perceived as a resurrection of quantitative easing rather than a technical adjustment.

Reporting by Richard Leong; Editing by Dan Burns and Richard Borsuk

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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-repo-tools-explainer/explainer-the-fed-has-a-repo-problem-whats-that-idUSKBN1W30EJ

2019-09-18 05:07:00Z
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