Quote from: Iseree22 on October 05, 2011, 03:13:20 PM

Quote from: BubbleBoy

The link you have supplied shows the Fed's balance sheet, on one hand the assets (table 1) it has acquired in exchange for freshly printed monetary base, and on the other hand it's liabilities, things like outstanding currency and bank reserves (table 1 continued). Commercial banks can't simply deposit treasuries towards the reserve requirements as you claim, the Fed only acquires treasuries when it decides to do so, so banks looking to meet reserve requirements need to trade the treasuries on the market. This clamps the money multiplier to a value controlled by the Central Bank, and not an ever increasing quantity proportional to the national debt.

Read it properly please. The FED accepts Treasuries in exchange for reserves when it conducts Repo transactions. If you don't know what a Repo is, please look it up. Therefore, if someone is short reserves, and wants to convert a Treasury into reserves it simply enters into a Repo Transaction with the FED. The Repo transaction involves the FED holding a Treasury(or other form of public debt) for a short period of time, in exchange for Reserves given to the private sector. The private sector will then treat these reserves like cash.

Repo and reverse-repo transactions are a tool for implementing monetary policy on the short run for up to 65 days, but usually overnight. Their total annual volume is in trillions, it's nonsensical to claim the Fed's whole security inventory is the result of repos. Furthermore, unlike US many countries don't have a repo market. You are also confusing the agents roles: the Central Bank initiates the repo as a tool of monetary policy, a bank short on reserves can't request a repo. A bank can either sell securities on the open market or in cases of emergency request financing at the discount window, at above market rates. If it could simply request a repo then what's the purpose of the discount window ?

Bickering about the technicalities of US monetary policy loses sight of the root issue: the bulk of govt. debt is not traded, they are held in reserve by institutional investors. So the MV quantity you mentioned has a very low aggregate V, thus the contribution of govt bonds in the the general price level is negligible despite the large M. On the contrary, monetizing the debt injects base money into the economy and the medium-long term effect is inflation.