MacroScope

Financial markets are again on edge about the direction of Fed policy following the surprisingly hawkish minutes of the January meeting released last week, even if most still expect the central bank to keep buying bonds at the current $85 billion monthly pace at least until the end of the year.

Federal Reserve Board Governor Jeremy Stein, an academic economist who joined the central bank last May, surprised Fed-watchers in his latest speech by focusing entirely on the risks of recent monetary stimulus and saying very little about its benefits. In particular, Stein, a corporate finance expert, raised the possibility that a bubble might be forming in the corporate bond markets, which has seen yields fall to record lows and issuance to record highs.

While the speech was riddled with caveats, Wall Street took it as an unusually stern warning about the potential side effects of quantitative easing from Fed’s inner-sanctum, the influential, presidentially-appointed Board of Governors in Washington. Stein argued:

Putting it all together, my reading of the evidence is that we are seeing a fairly significant pattern of reaching-for-yield behavior emerging in corporate credit. However, even if this conjecture is correct, and even if it does not bode well for the expected returns to junk bond and leveraged-loan investors, it need not follow that this risk-taking has ominous systemic implications. That is, even if at some point junk bond investors suffer losses, without spillovers to other parts of the system, these losses may be confined and therefore less of a policy concern.

His position should not be overstated: just in December Stein strongly backed QE3.

During a Q&A at the Brookings Institution last week, former Fed Vice Chairman Donald Kohn asked new board member Jeremy Stein, formerly a Harvard professor, about the impression that the Fed’s quantitative easing was only helping wealthy people who benefit most from rising stocks.

“How do you deal with this sense that the effects of policy aren’t being equitably felt in all parts of society,” asked Kohn, who worked at the Fed for four decades before stepping down in 2010, and is now a Brookings Fellow.

Stein, who joined the Fed’s influential Washington-based board in May as a governor, suggested this was not an entirely fair accusation given the wide-ranging effects of the policy. Here’s how he explained it: