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Sticky-fingered Fed

By Holden Lewis · Bankrate.com
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Posted: 1 pm ET

There's a saying that, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. For decades, the Federal Reserve wielded only a hammer as it maintained monetary policy. Then, five years ago, it borrowed a screwdriver. Today, we saw a sign that the Fed won't return the screwdriver it borrowed.

2 main jobs

One of the Fed's main tasks is to take care of monetary policy -- basically, adding and withdrawing cash from the financial system to keep inflation under control while also maintaining employment. This is called the dual mandate.

The dual mandate forces the Fed into a balancing act:

  • If the unemployment rate gets too low, then people have tons of money to spend. That sends prices upward, and then people buy things now, before prices rise even higher, and the high demand causes prices to rise even faster. You end up in an inflationary spiral.
  • If the inflation rate is too low, then people spend sluggishly. After all, if prices won't be higher a year from now, why rush to buy something? But because people aren't spending, businesses don't hire. You end up in recession.

The Fed's monetary policy body, the Federal Open Market Committee, tries to keep inflation low, but not too low -- around 2 to 2.5 percent -- and it tries to hold down the unemployment rate. To varying success over the years.

Introducing the hammer

The FOMC's tool has been the federal funds rate, which is the overnight interest rate for banks borrowing reserves among themselves. The federal funds rate influences other interest rates, such as the prime rate, which, among other things, is the base rate for home equity lines of credit and some credit cards.

The federal funds rate is the hammer that I mentioned above.

Here comes the screwdriver

When the financial crisis hit in 2007 and 2008, the Fed realized that it needed more than a hammer. So in late 2008, it borrowed a screwdriver: multibillion-dollar purchases of bonds. At first, the Fed bought Treasury notes, and later it added mortgage-backed securities to the mix.

The way I understood it, the Fed always had implied that these bond purchases were extraordinary measures -- that it would put away the screwdriver after the repairs were done. But that might not be the case.

Memo from Tarullo

Today, the Fed's longest-serving governor, Daniel Tarullo, delivered a lengthy speech to the National Association for Business Economics on the subject of monetary policy and financial stability. I've read a couple of articles about the speech, and it looks like the reporters missed the most newsworthy part of Tarullo's address, which came at the end (emphasis is mine):



Tarullo is saying that, even after things return to normal a few years from now, the FOMC might use two tools, not just one. It can use the federal funds rate to tweak short-term interest rates such as the prime rate, and bond purchases to influence longer-term interest rates such as mortgages.

It looks like the Fed wants to keep the screwdriver as well as the hammer.

Follow me on Twitter @HoldenL.

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1 Comment
February 26, 2014 at 8:21 am

Why does no one mention the real reason the Fed is doing what it is doing. Besides just bailing out their buddies in the bankrupt financial system, they also made sure that their buddies in government, who had their private savings deeply invested in these losers, didn't get burned. All on the backs of the taxpayer, who is mired in the papered over depression.