Economy Archives - Page 80 of 138 - the patient investor

September 23, 2013

Interest on Reserves, Settlement, and the Effectiveness of Monetary Policy

Joshua R. Hendrickson suggests that paying interest on excess reserves at the Fed reduces the effectiveness of monetary policy. Money paid to purchase Treasuries finds its way back to the Fed in the form of excess reserves. Here is the abstract from his paper:

Over the last several years, the Federal Reserve has conducted a series of large scale asset purchases. The effectiveness of these purchases is dependent on the monetary transmission mechanism. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has argued that large scale assets purchase are effective because they induce portfolio reallocations that ultimately lead to changes in economic activity. Despite these claims, a large fraction of the expansion of the monetary base is held as excess reserves by commercial banks. Concurrent with the large scale asset purchases, the Federal Reserve began paying interest on reserves and enacted changes in its Payment System Risk policy that have effectively made reserves and interest-bearing assets perfect substitutes. This paper demonstrates that these policy changes have had statistically and economically significant effects on the demand for reserves and simply that the effectiveness of conventional monetary policy has been significantly weakened.

Read the entire paper at Interest on Reserves, Settlement, and the Effectiveness of Monetary Policy |
Joshua R. Hendrickson.

September 22, 2013

Emperors of Banking Have No Clothes | Bloomberg

The too-big-to-fail problem for banks is greater today than it was in 2008. Since then, the largest U.S. banks have become much larger. On March 31, 2012, the debt of JPMorgan Chase was valued at $2.13 trillion and that of Bank of America Corp. at $1.95 trillion, more than three times the debt of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. The debt of the five largest U.S. banks totals about $8 trillion. These figures would be even larger under European accounting rules.

By Anat Admati & Martin Hellwig

September 19, 2013

Companies Unplug From the Electric Grid, Delivering a Jolt to Utilities | WSJ.com

On a hill overlooking the Susquehanna River, two big wind turbines crank out electricity for Kroger Co.’s KR +0.02% Turkey Hill Dairy in rural Lancaster County, Pa., allowing it to save 25% on its power bill for the past two years.

….From big-box retailers to high-tech manufacturers, more companies across the country are producing their own power. Since 2006, the number of electricity-generation units at commercial and industrial sites has more than quadrupled to roughly 40,000 from about 10,000, according to federal statistics.

By REBECCA SMITH and CASSANDRA SWEET

September 18, 2013

APRA: Australian banking system ‘more sound’

Interesting choice of words:

[Australian Prudential Regulation Authority chairman John Laker] said the Australian banking system was more sound than it was five or six years ago.

“We know that because we managed to negotiate the financial crisis without the fallout for our financial systems,” he said.

“The banking sector is holding more capital, it’s holding higher quality capital, it is holding more liquid assets.”

What he did not say is that Australian banks are financially sound and holding enough capital — and we are unlikely to hear that before banks double their current “improved” capital and leverage ratios.

September 17, 2013

Higher Bank Capital Requirements are Necessary but not Sufficient to Prevent the Next Crisis | naked capitalism

Bill Black explains why higher capital requirements for banks is only part of the solution. Capital is simply an accounting measure of Assets minus Liabilities and bankers are not above gaming this to their advantage.

….There were hundreds of Office of Thrift Supervision examiners whose opinions repeatedly proved vastly superior to the economists’ predictions during the S&L debacle. Akerlof and Romer concluded their 1993 article with these sentences in order to emphasize this message to their peers.

The S&L crisis, however, was also caused by misunderstanding. Neither the public nor economists foresaw that the [deregulation] of the 1980s were bound to produce looting. Nor, unaware of the concept, could they have known how serious it would be. Thus the regulators in the field who understood what was happening from the beginning found lukewarm support, at best, for their cause. Now we know better. If we learn from experience, history need not repeat itself. (Akerlof and Romer 1993: 60)

Larry and Janet: please listen to the regulators in the field. Please end Ben Bernanke’s practice of placing economists in charge of Fed supervision. The Fed’s economists are a major source of the Fed’s problems….. the solution needs to come from the people in the field. That is particularly true with regard to detecting systemic risks.

September 16, 2013

The Mysterious Disappearance of James Duesenberry | New York Times

Any successful consumption theory must accommodate three basic patterns: the rich save at higher rates than the poor; national savings rates remain roughly constant as income grows; and national consumption is more stable than national income over short periods.

The first two patterns appear contradictory: If the rich save at higher rates, savings rates should rise over time as everyone becomes richer. Yet this does not happen.

Mr. Duesenberry’s explanation of the discrepancy is that poverty is relative. The poor save at lower rates, he argued, because the higher spending of others kindles aspirations they find difficult to meet. This difficulty persists no matter how much national income grows, and hence the failure of national savings rates to rise over time…..

By ROBERT H. FRANK
Published: June 9, 2005

September 16, 2013

Imbalances in the Australian housing market | Chris Joye

Chris Joye from the Financial Review warns on Radio National that imbalances that may be developing in the Australian housing market:

Hat tip to Leith van Onselen at Macrobusiness.com.au who comments:

“My only observation is that governments of all persuasions have for too long abrogated their responsibilities for housing policy to the RBA – allowing affordability concerns to be addressed via continuous lowering of interest rates, rather than addressing the underlying causes of poor affordability through supply-side and taxation reform.”

September 11, 2013

Retired general speaks out against across-the-board spending cuts

Retired General Carter Ham, former head of U.S. Africa Command, speaks out against across-the-board spending cuts at the National Association for Business Economics in San Francisco:

“My least-favorite saying on the planet is to ‘do more with less.’ You don’t do more with less, you do less with less,” Gen. Ham said. “You have to figure out what’s most important.”

One solution would be to give federal agencies the flexibility to find savings where they can, rather than mandating how they make the cuts, he said. The government also needs to have frank discussions about how to reduce the military budget and shift priorities to address current and future threats.

~ From Sarah Portlock at WSJ online.

September 9, 2013

Why this is a bad time to win an election | Business Spectator

Prof. Steve Keen writes:

So what could the future hold for Prime Minister Abbott? Here I have a hunch that he’ll end up suffering a similar fate, not to the previous Liberal leader he admires – John Howard – but to ….. Malcolm Fraser.

Fraser, as noted, had the good fortune to take over from Whitlam after the bursting of the debt bubble was largely over, but the bad fortune that the revival in Australia’s bubble was considerably more anaemic than America’s. Abbott could well find himself experiencing a similar double-edged sword of fate. He will take over when the deleveraging that caused the GFC has come to a temporary halt, and demand will be rising in the US….. But this rise could peter out even more quickly than it did for Fraser, leading to anaemic economic performance that will be blamed on the politician rather than the times.

September 8, 2013

Vickers calls for doubling of bank capital levels | FT.com

“It is not very sensible to run a market economy on the basis of a banking system that is 33 times leveraged, let alone 40 or 50 times leveraged,” Sir John [Sir John Vickers, Oxford academic who chaired the Independent Commission on Banking] told the Financial Times. He believes the right number is closer to 10 times, equivalent to a 10 per cent ratio.

That is a lot higher than the 3 per cent (33 times leverage) required by Basel III and the 4.1% (CBA) to 4.5% (WBC) of the big four Australian banks.