John M. Berry is a guest columnist who has covered the economy for four decades for the Washington Post and other publications.

By John M. Berry

Financial crises and the policies to deal with them top the agenda at the Kansas City Fed's Jackson Hole conference. But what is actually going to be on everyone's mind at the august gathering is the uncertain future of the Federal Reserve itself.

Many members of Congress want to clip the Fed's wings for failing to prevent the crisis and for its actions since the meltdown began two years ago. In particular, most are angry about government bailouts, starting with the $29 billion in Fed backing for the purchase of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase.

Financial institutions got into trouble because they took enormous risks, and the public bailouts look suspiciously like unjustified rewards for fat cats' wildly reckless behavior. But the bailouts were an unavoidable cost of halting the country's plunge into a second Great Depression. Congress has got to swallow its anger and do what is needed for the future.

The first objective on the financial reform agenda when Congress reconvenes next month should be to do no harm. That means killing legislation that would direct the Government Accountability Office to "audit" the Fed's monetary policy actions. Such audits could allow politicians to influence those decisions, which is exactly what some of the bill's sponsors want.

Angry as they may be at the central bank right now, members of Congress would surely rue the day they had to deal directly with raising interest rates -- a step that will inevitably be needed at some point to curb inflation and keep the economy on an even keel.

Whatever else the role of the Fed is to be, its monetary policy independence should be preserved as it pursues its twin mandates of stable prices and maximum sustainable employment. And Fed officials need to be insulated from political pressures.

In return for that insulation, the Fed has become ever more open and accountable. Since 1994, the central bank has started announcing policy changes as soon as they are made, quickly publishing detailed minutes of policymaking meetings, and releasing transcripts after a five-year lag. It also now makes public details of the long-term forecasts of its top officials.

The second Fed role that must be preserved in the national interest is that of lender of last resort to financial institutions. Solvent banks that get squeezed for cash must be able to borrow directly from the central bank to prevent a failure that could trigger a collapse of other institutions.

Of course, the Fed, led by Ben Bernanke, went far beyond that traditional lending role last year. Citing legal authority not used since the 1930s, it loaned money not just to banks but to brokers, investment banks and insurance companies. And when that failed to stabilize money markets, it risked hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to buy mortgage-backed securities and other private credit instruments to make credit more available to businesses and households.

Bernanke and other Fed officials were uncomfortable extending credit in these unusual ways, which really ought to have been the Treasury's responsibility. But, objectionable as they were to many members of Congress and to a number of economists, these measures have proved essential. In any case, the Treasury Department did not have the money or the authority to act. To settle this for the future, Treasury should be granted both under the financial system overhaul.

There is also plenty of opposition to the administration's proposal to give the Fed broad oversight of financial markets as a regulator of systemic risk. The crisis has demonstrated that such a regulator is badly needed, and the Fed should win this one by default. Despite the central bank's failure to head off the crisis, there is simply no other agency -- not the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, the Comptroller of the Currency or any other -- capable of doing the job.

As for the remaining key issue, consumer protection, Bernanke should cede responsibility for truth-in-lending and all related activities to the new consumer agency proposed by the administration. If he does that, the Fed will be more likely to keep the powers it really needs.

If Ben Bernanke were running TV ads, taking polls and holding town hall-style meetings, it wouldn't be any clearer that he's conducting an explicit reelection campaign for another four-year term as Federal Reserve chairman come next January. Oh, wait a second, he just did hold an unprecedented town hall meeting. And it was one worthy of a presidential candidate charming primary voters in Iowa.

At the Kansas City Fed last night, Bernanke answered a couple dozen questions from 190 area residents for a three-part public television broadcast. Like a veteran politico, he tossed out the occasional platitude ("The best way to have a strong dollar is to have a strong economy"), railed against Washington ("I don't think the American people want Congress running monetary policy"), gave a riveting and heroic personal narrative ("I was not going to be the Federal Reserve Chairman who presided over the second Great Depression"), and got downright folksy when talking about too-big-too-fail ("When the elephant falls down, all the grass gets crushed as well").

Message to America: Ben Bernanke, a pharmacist's son from Dillon, South Carolina, feels your pain. Now it's not as if previous Fed chairmen haven't campaigned for another four-year hitch. But the usual modus operandi is to curry favor with the Electorate of One -- the president -- who will be doing the renominating. And the precise mechanism has been a growth-friendly monetary policy.

Of course, the Fed has already been, to use Bernanke's town hall phrase, "putting the pedal to the metal" to bolster the fragile economy and financial system. And that's sure been to Wall Street's liking. A Reuters poll last month found that economists rated Bernanke at eight out of 10 for his handling of the financial crisis.

But Bernanke's smart to try and also get Main Street on his side. Obama, for instance, might prefer a more dovish Fed chair, such as San Francisco Fed President Janet Yellen, who'll worry more about unemployment than inflation as the 2010 and 2012 elections near. Bernanke's pushback against Obama's proposals for a consumer financial protection agency is also another sign of his independence.

Plus, the president could desire to make more diversity history by nominating the first woman Fed chair -- while leaving it to aides to rip Bernanke in background briefs to reporters. ("He was part of the Fed team that left rates too low for too long and failed to regulate Wall Street." "Remember, he called the mortgage crisis a $100 billion problem." "Bernanke was way too slow to ease in 2007.") What's more, Bernanke has to worry about a Congress where populists in both parties have been critical of his role in providing bailouts to Wall Street banks and AIG, as well as Bank of America's takeover of Merrill Lynch.

So if Bernanke wants to keep his job, the PR campaign should continue. More TV interviews like the one he did on 60 Minutes in March. Maybe a televised town hall meeting in each Fed district. How about a Chairman's Blog? And if we start heading into November and Obama still hasn't renominated him? Two words: Oprah Winfrey.

– James Pethokoukis is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own –

Ben Bernanke’s testimony to Congress about his involvement in the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch merger was a lot like an FOMC statement: short and unadorned, yet open to much interpretation.

When the Federal Reserve chairman wasn’t repeatedly saying “I don’t remember” or “I don’t recollect,” he was matter-of-factly stating that he didn’t intend to threaten Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis with termination if he didn’t go through with the Merrill deal.

Yet both Republicans (all) and Democrats (some) seemed astonished that Bernanke wouldn’t admit that having the Fed outline all the negative repercussions of invoking the “material adverse change” clause to escape the Merrill deal was a de facto threat to BofA management.

Whether or not Bernanke actually believed his script was impossible to prove, since the Republicans, particularly Representative Darrell Issa of California, didn’t have evidence that Bernanke did intend to directly threaten Lewis.

It was Issa who said on television that Bernanke was engaged in a “cover-up” to disguise his actions in pushing the merger. Great claims require great proof. And Issa didn’t have great proof, just a bit of hearsay.

Yes, there was an email showing that Richmond Federal Reserve President Jeffrey Lacker claimed he told Lewis, after having a long talk with Bernanke, that BofA management was “gone” if it played the MAC threat. But Bernanke said that was a misinterpretation of his chat with Lacker.

So unless there is a transcript of the Lacker-Bernanke chat floating around somewhere, a dead end has been reached. Issa clearly overplayed his hand if what he actually meant to prove was that an outright deception had taken place. (Even if he had a smoking gun and Bernanke was somehow forced to resign, Issa would probably not like Fed Chairman Lawrence Summers any better.)

Then again, perhaps what the Republicans were actually trying to do was to paint Bernanke as an enabler of President Obama’s supposed big government policies. There has been a conservative backlash against the notion of the Fed operating as a “systemic risk” regulator that could serve as a catalyst for government takeovers of financial institutions — or bullying them, as the GOP charged Bernanke with doing in this case.

Of course, another criticism of the Fed as super-regulator would be that such a role would overly politicize the central bank. Indeed, it did seem weird that after grilling Bernanke for three hours and implying that he was lying, one Republican offered up a question about M2 and monetary policy.

Perhaps the one bit of evidence that did come out of the Bernanke interrogation was that having the Fed regulate banks and conduct monetary policy is a bad idea if you care about central bank independence.

For more on politics and the economy, check out James Pethokoukis’ blog at http://blogs.reuters.com/james-pethokoukis/

– Agnes T. Crane is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are her own –

Call it a battle for beginnings and endings, and the Federal Reserve is smack in the middle.

As Fed policymakers convene for a two-day meeting starting on Tuesday, the lines are growing more defined between those who want the Fed to do more to stimulate a still fragile economy, and those who are calling for a defined exit strategy to prevent the global economy from going into an inflation-inducing overdrive.

There’s a way to placate both camps, at least in the near-term, and that’s for Ben Bernanke and his colleagues to retire some of the temporary short-term lending facilities put in place at the height of the financial meltdown last year.

It would show good faith that the U.S. is serious about exiting some of those emergency facilities, and it would give the central bank breathing room to keep its ultra-easy monetary policy in place until it’s ready to call the all clear.

Bernanke, as a scholar of the Depression, is all too aware of what can happen should the central bank move too quickly and forcefully in removing stimulus.

One program in particular is a ripe candidate - the Commercial Paper Funding Facility.

Introduced last year, the CPFF made sure that highly-rated companies could get access to short-term funding at a time when traditional commercial paper lenders like money market funds, spooked by losses caused by the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, shunned such borrowing. By the end of 2008, the Fed’s commercial paper lending added $334.1 billion to its balance sheet.

Since then, the demand for short-term government financing has waned. For one, the program bought companies precious time to cut their dependence on short-term markets as they found financing elsewhere, such as the longer-term corporate bond market. The sharp slowdown in the economy also curbed companies’ need for short-term borrowing, which was often used to cover payrolls, rent or other basic expenditures.

In the latest week, the Fed reported that its facility had shrunk by $6 billion to $132.1 billion in a sign that companies were choosing to pay down their debt before next July when a good portion of the loans begin to mature.

Barclays Capital money-market strategist Joseph Abate expects the commercial paper facility, along with another facility that gives loans to banks so they’ll buy certain types of commercial paper from money market mutual funds, could fall below $50 billion by the time the programs are due to expire in October.

These programs have already been extended once, so they are still in play despite the stated end date.

While practically speaking there would be no harm in keeping facilities like the CPFF open indefinitely just in case financial markets should swoon again, there are pragmatic considerations that should be taken into account.

It’s better to show a commitment to exit strategies with a program that has largely run its course than to start tinkering with interest rates and quantitative easing that can have an outsized impact on the U.S. and global economy, which are still by no means out of the woods.

The World Bank reiterated on Monday its forecast for world economic slump this year, with output contracting by 2.9 percent rather than the 1.7 percent decline predicted in March.

The rise in Treasury yields earlier this month and the quashing effect they had on mortgage lending activity also should be a reminder that the Fed needs to stay flexible when it comes to its unorthodox policies. But it’s time to show the world that it’s also ready to put aside some weapons in its arsenal when the time is right.

– James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

The U.S. policy of keeping zombie financial institutions alive is so clearly failing that it is now attracting attack from inside policymakers’ circle of covered wagons.

The most interesting intervention in the banking debate in the past few weeks was an extraordinary attack by Kansas City Federal Reserve President Thomas Hoenig on what he termed a policy of “piecemeal” nationalization which leaves discredited management in place, repels new capital from the banking system and allows bad assets to fester rather than be cleared.

This is no academic who can be dismissed as having a poor grasp of the major systemic consequences of letting the big zombies fall, this is the man who has been a Fed president for 17 years and has a deep history in banking regulation, deeper and with more practical experience arguably than the people making the policies in Washington.

“If an institution’s management has failed the test of the marketplace, these mangers should be replaced. They should not be given public funds and then micro-managed, as we are now doing under TARP, with a set of political strings attached,” Hoenig said.

In short, it’s not an ideological attack on runaway market forces but a collection of sensible practical considerations that should limit the ideologically based decisions now being made.

And be in no doubt; administration policy as laid out by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Fed chief Ben Bernanke and White House economic advisor Larry Summers has as its core a fervent commitment not to take into state control large insolvent institutions, preferring instead to essentially bear the risk and the cost without having a clear line of accountability for day-to-day bank actions.

They are in essence going down the route Japan took in the 1990s, keeping banks alive and hoping they will earn their way out of the capitalization hole. And, to be fair, the yield curve in the U.S. is a lot steeper than it was in Japan, meaning that banks will earn on the difference between their funding costs and the longer-term rates they charge customers.

But there is are quite a lot of opportunity costs built into that strategy, even if it is convenient in avoiding temporary public ownership of large parts of the banking system.

These costs may only make themselves apparent in retrospect, if we find ourselves in two years time with a struggling banking system that still can’t intermediate capital effectively. More likely those costs will become uncomfortably visible in only months. Despite protestations from Citigroup and others that they are producing profits, there is a real danger that the unpredictable and ad hoc way in which banking is being bailed out scares depositors and, more to the point, bond buyers and clients into withdrawing their money, business and credit from ailing banks.

That’s how this will play out, not by the U.S. administration suddenly going all five year plan on us, but being forced to step in by events caused partly by their own inability to inspire confidence.

A GREAT TIME TO BE A BANK, PITY ABOUT THE COMPETITION

That is the sad irony, in many ways it’s now a pretty good time to be a bank, only you want to be one without legacy assets. Somebody should be making fat margins, what with there being less competition and a steep yield curve.

But why on earth would you commit funds to the banking system when you have no credible view on how capital will be treated by government going forward. I’d be scared witless that my equity ends up being forced into making all sorts of lousy loans for political purposes, or that as a bondholder I am ultimately forced to take equity when the losses become too big for even government, or that I face competition from some zombie with government funding and non-economic marching orders.

None of these are avoidable problems. But what we could do is deal with them quickly, share out the pain transparently and move on. And just because some of the insolvent institutions are huge doesn’t mean they can’t be handled. As it stands the incentives for banks are to be too big to fail, and to be “independent” but pliable.

Hoenig points out that the Depression-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation at one point held capital in 40 percent of all U.S. banks but because it was aggressive in writing down assets to realistic levels and turfing out failed management was able to do it without any net cost to government or taxpayers.

But for that to happen we have to write down assets to their clearing price, not prop them up so that we can pretend we all still live in 2006. If you do that, banks and the economy have a chance, capital will return, loans will be made where they make sense and growth eventually will return.

– At the time of publication James Saft did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund. –

– James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

Another week, another set of protestations that U.S. banks will remain in private hands, apparently almost regardless of the consequences.

It is clear that nationalization violates a sacred value for U.S. policymakers, or perhaps they believe it to be a sacred value held by voters. As we know from behavioral economics, when people are confronted by a conflict between material advantage and their ideas of the sacred, they tend to opt surprisingly often for the sacred.

Sometimes that is utterly right, but in this case it is really a false opposition. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation takes control of failed U.S. banks almost every Friday, and while taking some of the biggest over would pose huge problems, it should be possible to do it, to speed recovery and to hang on to what is essential: a market-driven system of capital allocation and a credible 3- or 4-year glide path to privatization for those assets and institutions that end up in taxpayers’ hands.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke added his voice to those maintaining that the crisis would be contained — no, wait, that was 2007’s line — that the banks wouldn’t be nationalized.

“I don’t see any reason to destroy the franchise value or to create the huge legal uncertainties of trying to formally nationalize a bank when it just isn’t necessary,” Bernanke told the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday.

“What we can do is make sure they have enough capital to fulfil their function and at the same time we exert adequate control to make sure that they are doing what is necessary to become healthy and viable over the longer term,” he said.

“Franchise value” is a risible concept for many of the banks in question. Who will choose to do business with a bank whose shares are trading at penny levels, even if their deposits and funding are essentially backstopped by the United States? My guess is that it really only happens where that institution offers better than market terms to its clients, which in essence is a subsidy via the government and exactly the kind of market distortion those who oppose nationalization say they wish to avoid.

And while “legal uncertainties” are regrettable, let’s get real; we are operating in a time of huge and immediately unresolvable uncertainties, legal and otherwise, not least how contracts underlying mortgage backed securities will be handled as part of the effort to stave off foreclosure.

(I GOT THOSE) TANGIBLE COMMON EQUITY BLUES

There appears to be some movement beneath the serene anti-nationalization surface. It is interesting and encouraging that the United States is reportedly considering converting some of the preferred securities it holds in Citibank and American International Group ultimately into common equity. Even better, it may decide to do the same with other past and future equity infusions, with the idea being that banks found wanting under the upcoming stress tests get an infusion of capital that would convert to equity as needed.

I see this as part of the process of the U.S. renegotiating what is and isn’t sacred. The problem with the old preference for preferred shares was that, while it checked the box of providing regulatory capital to banks, it did nothing to entice equity investors into holding their shares or committing new capital. Anyone could see that when the freight train of losses struck the bank’s balance sheet, ordinary shareholders would take the first hit.

Sadly, in their acrobatics to avoid putting banks into government control, the U.S. authorities risk becoming like a hospital that finally decides to use the wonder drug of common equity on patients who have already died.

What the government needs to do is real triage, leaving some to fend for themselves, giving those with genuine hope support — and common equity is the way to do that — and euthanising the zombie banks. Some of those in the middle might just end up with the government as majority shareholder.

George Magnus of UBS points out that there are two key issues that need to be resolved before normal growth can be restored and deflation staved off. First, debt needs to be paid down (or openly defaulted) and savings built up. Second, the financing system needs to be restored to health.

If we don’t hurry up with the second, the retrenching will be deeper and we may long for a scenario akin to Japan’s lost decade.

Remember, we already have the state directing credit into parts of the financial system. If the state supports zombie banks but exercises influence over them, rather than either controlling them directly or having a transparent arms-length relationship, we end up with a very bad scenario: state-controlled lending without transparency or true accountability.

– At the time of publication James Saft did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund. For previous columns by James Saft, click here. –

– John Kemp is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

For the world monetary system, the financial crisis which erupted in the summer of 2007 is a cataclysmic shift that will prove every bit as significant as the outbreak of the First World War (which heralded sterling’s demise as a reserve currency) and the suspension of gold convertibility in 1971 (which marked the end of bullion’s monetary role).

The crisis marks the passing of an era in which the U.S. dollar has been the world’s undisputed reserve currency for making international payments and storing wealth.

The dollar is not about to lose its reserve status completely. But it is set to become less “special”. In future, it will increasingly have to share its reserve status with the euro, the yen and perhaps the currencies of the other advanced economies. In time, it may even have to share its status with China’s yuan.

In fact, the whole concept of a single reserve currency (the dollar) and a principal reserve asset (U.S. Treasury bonds) is set to undergo a profound shift. Policymakers, businesses and households will in future think about and hold a whole portfolio of competing reserve currencies and assets. Multipolarity in the world of security and economic relations is set to be matched by a world with multiple reserve currencies.

One positive consequence may be greater stability in a more diversified financial system, once the current crisis is passed. But the price for the United States may be a loss of policy autonomy for Treasury and Federal Reserve officials used to being able to ignore the international dimension when deciding interest rates and budget deficits.

EXTERNAL IMBALANCES

Leading economists agree that global imbalances lie at the root of the current crisis. But opinions are more sharply divided on their origins, which countries are to blame, and what should be done to resolve them.

The Fed’s critics argue that cheap money policies in the late 1990s and early 2000s are mainly responsible for fueling a debt-driven consumer boom, and sucking in record volumes of imports, many from the newly industrializing economies of Asia. Funding all this required issuing huge volumes of debt, much of it securitized against dubious mortgages and consumer debts, and sold to foreigners when domestic savings proved inadequate.

In contrast, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and some leading commentators blame China. In their view, China’s reliance on export-led growth, refusal to allow the yuan to appreciate, accumulation of foreign reserves, and recycling of surplus foreign exchange back into the market for U.S. government bonds and mortgage-backed securities created a “global savings glut”. This glut artificially reduced global interest rates and created the perverse incentives for an unsustainable build up of debt in the United States.

Differing interpretations about the origin of the imbalances lead to the two sides to proffer different solutions. Fed critics argue the solution lies in a long-term tightening of U.S. credit conditions and higher domestic savings. Bernanke and his supporters argue the solution is for China to stimulate domestic demand, appreciate the yuan and reduce reserve accumulation.

In reality, it takes both a lender and a borrower to create a debt crisis; the solution to the crisis lies in balanced adjustments on both sides.

AMERICA CONTRA MUNDUM

While it is tempting to blame China’s “mercantilist” trade policies for the crisis, China is only the latest in a long line of countries the United States has blamed for its own trade and financial problems (Germany and France in the 1960s, Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, the Asian Tigers in 1990s).

It is possible the rest of the world has been consistently wrong, and the United States has been consistently right. But it seems more likely there is something that makes the United States uniquely prone to excess domestic spending and running large trade deficits that in put pressure on the country’s external position.

There are several candidates for the source of American exceptionalism. But perhaps the most obvious cause is the role of the dollar. The United States has run larger budget and current account deficits than most other countries simply because as the issuer of the principal reserve currency it can.

The positive side has been the ability to borrow more cheaply and in larger amounts than other countries. The dark side has been a steady accumulation of internal and more importantly external debt that is now a source of enormous financial instability.

THE TRIFFIN DILEMMA

This paradox linked to the provision of the world’s reserve currency was first noted by Yale economist Robert Triffin. In a famous warning to Congress in 1960, Triffin explained that as the marginal supplier of the world’s reserve currency the United States had no choice but to run persistent current account deficits.

As the global economy expanded, demand for reserve assets increased. These could only be supplied to foreigners by America running a current account deficit and issuing dollar-denominated obligations to fund it. If the United States stopped running balance of payments deficits and supplying reserves, the resulting shortage of liquidity would pull the global economy into a contractionary spiral.

But Triffin warned that if the deficits continued, excess global liquidity risked fueling inflation. Worse still the build up in dollar-denominated liabilities might cause foreigners to doubt whether the United States could maintain gold convertibility or might be forced to devalue.

Triffin was writing in a world of fixed exchange rates, but his work provides a useful way of thinking about the current crisis. In the 1950s, the fear was convertibility of greenbacks into gold. Today, the fear is dollar devaluation, inflationary default on Treasury bonds, or capital losses on securitized products linked to widespread insolvencies.

Triffin’s work suggests that the Fed did have a choice in the late 1990s and early 2000s, albeit an unpalatable one. Officials could have refused to supply the incipient demand for liquidity. Higher interest rates could have prevented the (worldwide) borrowing boom and widespread deterioration of financial standards seen in recent years. But they would also have meant lower growth in the United States and the rest of the world.

Instead, senior officials chose to accommodate overseas demand and reserve accumulation. Low interest rates and the resulting current account deficit provided record liquidity to the rest of the world but at the price of deteriorating credit standards and increasing fragility. The result was plentiful international liquidity and rapid growth, but with the build up of huge indebtedness concentrated in the United States as the issuer of the world’s main reserve currency.

The United States is not the first country to discover the perils as well as the benefits of issuing the world’s main reserve currency. The United Kingdom experienced chronic instability during in the 1918-1939 period in part because the large outstanding “sterling balances” overseas threatened to overwhelm the country’s limited gold reserves and financial system if reserve holders tried to convert them into gold or other currencies.

Maintaining sterling’s convertibility into gold and the integrity of the sterling area required a recognition that attempted conversion would involve “mutually assured destruction” (the United Kingdom would be forced off gold and the Dominions would find the value of their sterling holdings cut). The United States and China are now locked in a similar embrace over China’s massive holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds.

But perhaps the clearest warning about the problems of being the dominant supplier of reserves to the rest of the world was issued by Henry Fowler, secretary of the U.S. Treasury in the mid-1960s: “Providing reserves and exchanges for the whole world is too much for one country and one currency to bear”.

Triffin’s own solution to the dilemma - the creation of new sources of liquidity based on issuing more IMF special drawing rights that would not be liability for any one country - is politically unrealistic. But reducing reliance on the dollar and U.S. Treasuries and supplementing them with other reserve assets is a necessary step to reduce system fragility. The shift is probably already underway as faith in the once-invincible dollar and U.S. financial system declines.

– John Kemp is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own –

Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and his predecessor Alan Greenspan have unleashed a series of ever-larger asset bubbles they cannot control.

Now the Fed’s decision to cut interest rates to between zero and 0.25 percent, coupled with a promise to keep them there for an extended period, and the threat to conduct even more unconventional operations in the longer-dated Treasury market risks the biggest bubble of all, this time in U.S. government debt.

THE ASYMMETRIC EXPERIMENT

Bubble mania is no accident. It is the direct consequence of the Fed’s asymmetric response to shifts in asset prices. Pressed to “lean against the wind” and adopt counter-cyclical interest rate and credit policies in the asset market, senior Fed policymakers have repeatedly demurred.

Led by Bernanke and Greenspan, officials have argued it is too hard and subjective to identify bubbles until afterwards, and not the Fed’s job to second-guess asset allocation decisions of professional investors.

Even if bubbles could be identified, they argue, pricking them would require swingeing rate rises that would inflict widespread damage on the rest of the economy.

Far less damaging to allow asset markets to follow their natural cycle and stand by to cut interest rates sharply, supply liquidity and contain the fallout when the bubble bursts.

But the Fed’s asymmetric policy response to rising and falling asset prices (colloquially known as the “Greenspan/Bernanke put”) directly led to much of the excessive risk-taking which has humbled the financial system over the last eighteen months.

More importantly, the Fed’s decision to respond to the collapse of the technology and stock market bubble by lowering rates to 1 percent and holding them there for an extended period is now widely accepted as a mistake that contributed to the bond bubble and subsequent housing market boom in the middle of the decade.

If the low-rate strategy was a mistake, it was a conscious one. In testimony to the UK Parliament last year, former Bank of England Governor Eddie George admitted the bank had deliberately sought to stimulate the housing market and house prices to support consumption during the downturn.

Greenspan, Bernanke and Co seem to have adopted a similar approach in the United States.
The real mistake, however, was not creating one bubble to offset the collapse of another, but believing they could control what they had wrought.

When the Fed did eventually start to raise short-term interest rates in 2004, long rates remained stubbornly low for a year, and then rose much more slowly than anticipated, a development the puzzled Fed chairman and his able assistant Dr Bernanke described as “the Great Conundrum”.

Even as rates eventually rose, the alchemy of securitization ensured the real cost of credit remained far too low until the subprime bubble finally burst in late 2007.

The second mistake is a basic design flaw in the Fed’s “risk-management” approach to setting monetary policy. Risk management is a nice idea, but not terribly useful. As engineer will explain, risk management involves trade offs and is not cost-free.

The Fed has struggled to formulate a response to “low probability, high impact” events such as the threat of deflation in the early 2000s. Its response has been to cut rates aggressively to ward off the danger of extreme downside events, a strategy officials liken to taking out an insurance policy.

That’s fine, but when these low risk events have not in fact occurred, as was never statistically likely, the resulting policy settings have proved far too loose, and the central bank much too slow to change it.

Concentrating on theoretical but small risks such as deflation has too often blinded the Fed to much larger risks near at hand of bubbles and asset inflation.

INTO THE UNKNOWN

Even as officials recognize policy has played a role stimulating an endless series of bubbles, the Fed finds itself trapped with no way out. Following the collapse of much of the modern banking system, the risk of pernicious deflation is now very real–more so than in the early 2000s.

So like the sorcerer’s apprentice, the Fed has cranked up the Great Bubble Machine for what policymakers hope will be one final time.

The Fed’s “unconventional” monetary strategy comes in four parts:

(1) Cutting interest rates to near-zero to lower the cost of borrowing.

(2) Injecting short-term liquidity into the financial system in the form of bank reserves (quantitative easing).

(3) Trying to pull down yields on longer-dated Treasury bonds through a combination of the jawbone (promising to keep short rates low for an extended period) and the threat to intervene in the market directly by buying longer-dated paper.

(4) Trying to reduce credit spreads above the Treasury yield for other borrowers, and increase the quantity of credit available, by buying mortgage-backed agency bonds for its own account, and financing other market participants to buy securities backed by other consumer credits, auto loans and student loans.

Most attention has focused on the zero-rate policy and quantitative easing at the short end of the curve. But the real significance lies in the unconventional operations targeting Treasury yields and eventually credit spreads at the long end.

Operations at the short end are designed to bolster the banking system and restart lending. But the Fed knows the banking system is not large enough to replace the much more important sources of credit from securities markets.

Operations at the long end are designed to get bond finance and securitized credit flowing. Short-end interest rates and quantitative operations are significant because they help shape the whole term structure of interest rates embedded in the curve.

ONE LAST SUPER-BUBBLE

The strategy has already succeeded in halving yields from over 4 percent in mid October to just 2.25 percent now.

By convincing investors interest rates will remain ultra low for a long period, the Fed has made them willing to lend to the U.S. government for up to ten years for what is a paltry return.

There are two risks. First, the massive rise in bond prices and compression of yields has come in the secondary market. The U.S. Treasury has not yet succeeded in placing much of its massively expanded debt and new requirements for next year at such low levels. But given the panic-driven demand for default-free assets, officials should not have too much difficulty.

The bigger one is that the Fed is misleading investors into the biggest bubble of all time. Bernanke is making what learned economists call a “time-inconsistent” promise to hold interest rates at ultra low levels for an extended period.

The problem is that if the unconventional monetary policy works, and the economy picks up, the Fed will come under pressure to “normalize” rates and reduce excess liquidity to prevent a rise in inflation. The resulting rate rises will inflict massive losses on anyone who bought bonds at today 2.25 percent rate.

Bizarrely, Bernanke and Co are in fact inviting investors to bet the policy will fail, the economy will remain mired in slump for a long period, deflation will occur and interest rates will remain on the floor, as Japan’s have done since the 1990s.

Buyers of real estate and subprime securities have recently been lampooned for foolishly overpaying at the top of the market. Bernanke and Co are gambling memories will prove short and investors will prove just as eager to pay top prices for long-term government and private debt even though the downside is large.

Let us have one last bubble, and when it collapses, we promise not to do any more in future…honest.

For previous columns by John Kemp, click here.

– James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

One of the many comfortable but unreliable certainties now coming unglued is the idea that U.S. Treasury interest rates are the paramount benchmark, a measure of “risk free” investment, an idea at the heart of finance.

In the old days we quaintly believed that U.S. government debt yields represented a benchmark against which all other types of risk taking could be measured. The 30-year yield, later supplanted by the 10-year, used to be called the most important rate in the world for just that reason. All other risk taking began from this handy jumping off point and all capital allocation decisions used it as an implicit or explicit input.

That role of the benchmark of benchmarks, which greases the wheels of finance making it more “efficient” but more prone to spectacular error, is now under attack from a number of directions.

In retrospect, it seems clear that artificially low interest rates, due in large part to Treasury purchases by China seeking to keep its own currency and exports competitive, helped to turbo charge risk taking during the boom.

Living in a world of “low” interest rates and eternal moderation, investors didn’t realise how much risk they were taking on when they sought extra return above government debt, and after a while the money was so good they didn’t really care. In combination with credit ratings, another failed benchmark, that helped to fuel the boom.

Now we are living with the bust and coming to realize just how useful and dangerous benchmarks are.
“Nowadays it would be too much to ask for benchmarks. We all have to make our decisions on the basis of our own perceptions of the situation,” said Stephen Lewis, economist at Monument Securities in London.

Well and good, but as you can see the result of us all making our own decisions based on our own very limited data about how much risk there is in the world or in a given investment is abject terror
and an inability to act: much less risk taking.

People are only really willing to lend or invest in what they truly know, and as we each individually or as institutions know very little, we will invest very little and at, for the economy, ruinously high rates.

100 TIMES MORE RISK

The U.S.’s benchmark status as a “risk free” borrower is based on the idea that it is the best available credit, a solid gold borrower that will not default. And of course as Treasuries are denominated in dollars and as the state ultimately can print money to fulfil its obligations, that is correct.

But investors clearly are becoming increasingly spooked that the United States’ difficult situation and its absolutely huge borrowing plans are making it a less certain risk.

It now costs 60 basis points a year to buy a five-year credit default swap insurance policy against U.S. sovereign default, up from about 15 basis points in August and 100 times more than in January 2007 when it was 0.6 basis points. Clearly, somebody thinks risk free isn’t so risk free any more.
This compares with a 50 basis point cost for German or Japanese debt.

And remember too that 5-year Treasuries are only yielding about 1.70 percent, so a hedge against default would eat up quite a lot of one’s return.

Ironically, the Federal Reserve’s potential strategy of buying up government debt to reliquify the economy and avoid deflation may just make things worse.

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke last week said the Fed could directly purchase “substantial quantities” of longer-term securities issued by the U.S. Treasury or government-sponsored agencies to lower yields and stimulate demand.

Fair enough, and it’s not as if I have a better plan for jump-starting the economy, but having the state buy up Treasuries will only put more distance between a genuine “risk free” rate and reality. Investors will be even more in the dark about what and where risk is. They will not know where Treasuries would trade without Fed intervention, nor will they know when and how quickly the Fed will roll back that intervention when growth and inflation inevitably arise again.

That may sound like a technical point, but it is extremely serious. It seems likely to me that investors will alternate between two poles: totally terrified and unwilling to take any risk, and too giddy and scared to miss out. My guess is that this policy will extend the first state and turbo-charge the second.

Lack of confidence in benchmarks will keep people frozen longer, and make them float another bubble when at last they come round.

The failures of the past 10 years are failures of misallocation of capital; first the dot-com bust, then housing.
It is very hard to know what to root for: another bubble or deep, deep recession as investors, stripped of all their illusions, advance capital only to what little they actually know.

– At the time of publication James Saft did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund. For previous columns by James Saft, click here. –

– John Kemp is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own –

Quietly, without fanfare, the Federal Reserve has turned on the printing presses.  The central bank is flooding the market with enough excess liquidity to refloat the banking system — and hopes to generate an upturn in both economic activity and inflation in the next 12-18 months to prevent the economy falling into a prolonged slump.

Since the banking crisis intensified in September, the Fed has been rapidly expanding the credit side of its balance sheet, providing an ever-increasing array of facilities to support the financial system (repos, term auction credit, primary discount credit, broker-dealer credit, commercial paper funding, money market mutual fund liquidity and term securities lending).

Total credit extended by the central bank has surged from an average of $885 billion in the week ending August 27 to $2.198 trillion in the week ending November 12.  Credit extensions surged another $142 billion last week alone — mostly in form of increased term auction credit (+$114 billion) and other miscellaneous credits the central bank does not break out (+$41 billion).

Until fairly recently, the expansion on the asset side of the Fed’s balance sheet was matched by increased non-bank liabilities, mostly in the form of higher balances deposited by the US Treasury into its regular and special supplementary financing accounts at the central bank.

Since the Treasury was borrowing this money in the open market by issuing cash management bills, the impact of the Fed’s balance sheet expansion was being fully sterilized.

The Fed was providing liquidity in the narrow sense (helping commercial banks cover short-term funding problems arising from illiquid assets on their books) but not in the broader sense of inflating the money supply (money in circulation plus vault cash plus reserve balances).

But in the last three weeks, something very significant has happened. The non-bank part of the Fed’s liabilities has stopped expanding:  combined Treasury deposits with the Fed plus cash in circulation has actually fallen from $1.517 trillion in the week ending Oct 29 to $1.467 trillion in the week ending Nov 12.

Instead, the Fed’s increased lending to the financial system over the last two weeks (+$325 billion) has been matched by an increase in the volume of deposits the commercial banks are hold with the Fed (+$331 billion).

In other words, the Fed is now lending to the banks, which are now lending the funds back to the central bank.   The Fed is no longer supplying just narrow liquidity needed to enable the market to function.  It is now supplying excess funds (more than the banks need) which are being recycled back into the central bank.

The volume of reserve balances with the Fed, which had jumped from $8 billion at end Aug to $280 billion by mid Oct, has now surged again to a staggering $592 billion in the week ending Nov 12.
The Fed is now very deliberately supplying more liquidity than the banks need (or are willing to lend on to other banks, corporations or homeowners).  By paying a low but positive interest rate on these reserve balances, it can ensure that the federal funds rate remains above zero (currently about 35 basis points) even as it floods the banking system with excess funds.

There are several startling implications:

(1)  The central bank has successfully driven a wedge between interest rate policy (the target fed funds rate) and the quantity of money created (cash plus reserve balances).   This was the explicit aim, foreshadowed a recent paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (http://www.ny.frb.org/research/EPR/08v14n2/0809keis.pdf).  The Fed is now free to expand bank reserves almost without limit while maintaining the fed funds target (at least very loosely).

(2)  The Fed’s focus has now shifted from easing the interest rate to increasing the quantity of money, and the aim of supplying funds is no longer to ease concerns about narrow liquidity but to increase the overall money supply, thereby easing concern about the stability of the banks, while hoping to engineer an eventual upturn in lending, activity and (whisper it quietly) inflation.

This is precisely the radical strategy adopted by the Bank of Japan in the late 1990s and early part of the current decade, when it was described as “quantitative easing”.  Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, a keen student of liquidity traps during the Great Depression and Japan’s decade long banking and economic slump, threatened some time ago that the Fed could always increase the quantity of money by manipulating the size and composition of its balance sheet.

In a 2004 paper Bernanke noted: “nothing prevents a central bank from switching its focus from the price of reserves to the quantity or growth of reserves. When stated in terms of quantities, it becomes apparent that even if the price of reserves (the federal funds rate) becomes pinned at zero, the central bank can still expand the quantity of reserves. That is, reserves can be increased beyond the level required to hold the overnight rate at zero–a policy sometimes referred to as ‘quantitative easing.’ Some evidence exists that quantitative easing can stimulate the economy even when interest rates are near zero; see, for example, Christina Romer’s (1992) discussion of the effects of increases in the money supply during the Great Depression in the United States.”

Bernanke argues that quantitative easing may affect the economy through at least three channels:

(1)  Large increases in the money supply will lead investors to rebalance portfolios, reducing yields on other non-money assets, stimulating investment,consumption and other economic activity.

(2)  Setting a high level of reserves and committing to maintain it until certain (economic) conditions have been fulfilled is an alternative and perhaps more visible and credible way to stimulate growth and promising to maintain a low interest rate.

(3)  By expanding its balance sheet and replacing public holdings of interest-bearing government debt with non-interest bearing (or very low interest) money and reserves, the central bank may attempt to hold down yields on a range of government securities, making borrowing cheaper, and cutting the costs of an expansionary fiscal policy. The strategy works if and only if the central bank can pre-commit not to reverse the quantitative easing policy for some considerable period and until certain conditions have been met.

Bernanke went on to note: “The forms of monetary stimulus described above can be used once the overnight rate has already been driven to zero or as a way of driving the overnight rate to zero.
However, a central bank might choose to rely on these alternative policies while maintaining the overnight rate somewhat above zero.”

Moreover, alternative monetary policies such as quantitative easing could enable the central bank to avoid the problem that nominal interest rates cannot readily be cut below zero:   “A quite different argument for engaging in alternative monetary policies before lowering the overnight rate all the way to zero is that the public might interpret a zero instrument rate as evidence that the central bank has “run out of ammunition.”

That is, low rates risk fostering the misimpression that monetary policy is ineffective. As we have stressed, that would indeed be a misimpression, as the central bank has means of providing monetary stimulus other than the conventional measure of lowering the overnight nominal interest rate”.   Since the middle of October, the Federal Reserve has begun to put precisely this strategy into practice.

Quantitative easing has begun.

Bernanke once threatened to send in the monetary helicopters if that was necessary to avoid deflation and a renewed Great Depression. The massive surge in bank reserves in the past fortnight suggests the helicopters have now been scrambled and the strategy is being put to the test.