The U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve System have long enjoyed a close relationship, each helping the other to carry out certain statutory responsibilities. This relationship proved benefi cial during the 2008-09 fi nancial crisis, when the Treasury altered its cash management practices to facilitate the Fed’s dramatic expansion of credit to banks, primary dealers, and foreign central banks.

…Understanding the relationship between Federal Reserve credit policy and Treasury cash management is important because the relationship illuminates an important but sometimes unappreciated interface between the Treasury and the Fed. It also underscores the symbiotic relationship between the two institutions, in which each assists the other in fulfilling its statutory responsibilities.”

Naturally, this stunningly incorrect conceptualization of the lending process and how it interacts with bank reserves leads people to think how to entice banks to “get this money out the door” including to thoughts of “negative” deposit rates as an incentive.

My frustration lies in my inability to explain to “sophisticated” people why in a modern monetary system–fiat money, floating exchange rate world–there is absolutely no correlation between bank reserves and lending. And, more fundamentally, that banks do not lend “reserves”.

Commercial bank reserves have risen because central banks have injected them into a closed system from which they cannot exit. Whether commercial banks let the reserves they have acquired through QE sit “idle” or lend them out in the interbank market 10,000 times in one day among themselves, the aggregate reserves at the central bank at the end of that day will be the same.

There is nowhere else they can go in a closed system. I cannot hold a deposit at the ECB, or at the Fed, or at the Bank of England. Not even the Fed’s primary dealers have accounts at the Fed, they operate through clearing banks who are depository institutions. So it simply not possible for the banking system as a whole to make its deposit balances at the central bank decline by trading with anyone other than the central bank itself.

The concept of balanced budgets has long existed as a weapon in mainstream political rhetoric, but only since the 1994 elections has this rhetoric run the significant possibility of becoming political reality.

Yet before such a goal is uniformly embraced and enacted as policy, Congress and Clinton should pause to reflect on whether such an objective deserves its place at the pinnacle of our economic objectives. Upon such reflection, there is good reason to believe that it does not.

There is, for instance, no historical data that would demonstrate that a balanced budget enhances gross domestic product (GDP) or any other indicator of economic productivity. Balanced budget advocates have long contended that the absence of a balanced budget opens the door to a “crowding-out effect? on interest rates, whereby government borrowing actually closes out private borrowing, thus raising interest rates on private credit and slowing the economy. Contrary to this, however, some of the most profound drops in interest rates and expansions in economic growth have occurred at moments when the deficit has been on the rise (witness, for instance, the interest-rate drop and economic growth that largely characterized the eight-year Reagan administration period).

Nor is there any particular evidence demonstrating that our current budget deficit is necessarily at the root of any particular economic problem that a balanced budget would correct. True, the balanced budget is a convenient political means for cutting the substantial waste and even fraud that exists in federal expenditures, but there is no reason to believe that this could not be accomplished short of wedding our nation’s policy leaders to a squarely balanced budget in every fiscal year.

BALANCED BUDGETS BEHIND DEPRESSIONS

Perhaps most convincingly, America does have some previous experience with balanced-budget efforts, and it is cause not for celebration but considerable alarm. Without exception, on six consecutive occasions from 1817 until 1930 when government cut spending considerably without simultaneously seeking to stimulate the economy with equally deep tax cuts or other fiscal stimuli, depressions arose. The correlation is a shocking 100 percent. Balanced-budget efforts in America have always preceded national depressions.

Mosler's Soft Currency Economcis II

Mosler's Soft Currency Economcis II