Bernanke may seek new ways to ease credit as Fed rate nears 1%
By Craig Torres
Oct. 23 (Bloomberg) — Federal Reserve officials are likely to bring interest rates down so aggressively over the next few months that they will have to search for fresh tactics to continue easing credit.
All that’s left is the Fed buying longer term treasury securities to attempt to flatten the curve, get mortgage rates down, and add reserves.
This will ‘flood the market’ with reserves that now pay interest, so they can do this without a zero interest rate policy.
Their theory is that with more reserves banks will lend more, which is not the case, both in theory and practice, as Japan proved not long ago.
Instead of the Fed buying long term securities the treasury should simply stop issuing them and issue more bills. The treasury not issuing longer term securities is functionally the same as the treasury issuing them and then the Fed buying them. But with a lot fewer transaction costs.
[top]