The Unintended Consequences Of ‘Lift-Off’ In A World Of Excess Reserves
by Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk via Bawerk.net,
ZeroHedge.com
11/28/2015
Barring a disastrous NFP print this coming Friday the US Federal Reserve will change the target range for the Federal Reserve (Fed) Bank’s Funds rate from the current level of zero – 25bp to 25 – 50bp on December 16th. The Fed will effectively raise the overnight interbank rate of interest to around 30bp from an average of only 12bp in 2015. Ironically, that will be seven years, to the day, when the Fed first lowered rates to the current band.
During the period of ZIRP madness, the Fed’s balance sheet ballooned 6.2 times its pre-Lehman size to allow the central bank to add monetary “stimuli” even at the zero lower bound. Consequently the financial system got stuffed with more cash than they knew what to do with; commercial banks thus ended up funding the very same assets they sold to the central bank through excess reserves held as deposits with the Federal Reserve bank itself
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