MacroScope

Federal Reserve officials have been worried that their policy of ultra-low interest rates may be having less of an effect than usual because of a “broken transmission channel.” In plain English, this means the money hasn’t really been flowing smoothly from liquidity-flooded banks to would-be borrowers.

Economists at TD Securities argue banks have passed on less than half of their lower funding rates as reflected in yields on mortgage-backed securities onto consumers.

During the current iteration of monetary policy easing, pass-though peaked at 66% during the third week following the QE3 announcement, when MBS yields rebounded from their post-QE3 lows and 30-year mortgage rates fell to a record-low 3.36%. However, since the QE3 announcement, our calculations suggest that banks have passed through an average of just 40% of their lower funding rates (i.e. lower MBS yields) in the form of lower mortgage rates.

The concern was flagged in a speech by New York Fed President William Dudley this week:

Federal Reserve MBS purchases have succeeded in driving down mortgage rates to historically low levels. But these purchases would have had still more effect on the economy if pass-through rates from the secondary market to the primary market had been higher. As can be seen in Exhibit 3, the Federal Reserve’s purchases significantly narrowed the spread between agency MBS and Treasury yields, with the latest round of purchases significantly narrowed the spread between agency MBS and Treasury yields, with the latest round of purchases notably effective in this regard. But, as shown in Exhibit 4 the spread between primary mortgage rates and agency MBS yields3 has widened and this has limited the drop in primary mortgage rates.

Regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents who oppose quantitative easing have made little way in convincing the central bank’s dovish core. Apparently, not so on the cause célèbre of policymakers like Richard Fisher at the Dallas Fed, who have called for too big to fail banks to be broken up.

In a speech this week, Fed board governor and regulation czar Daniel Tarullo stopped short of calling for outright break-ups. But he did take the unprecedented step of backing size limitations on banks that would be linked to overall U.S. economic output.

In his own words:

In these circumstances, however, with the potentially important consequences of such an upper bound and of the need to balance different interests and social goals, it would be most appropriate for Congress to legislate on the subject. If it chooses to do so, there would be merit in its adopting a simpler policy instrument, rather than relying on indirect, incomplete policy measures such as administrative calculation of potentially complex financial stability footprints.

Financial markets on Thursday were starkly disappointed with the European Central Bank and its president, Mario Draghi. He had promised recently to do everything in his power to save the euro and yet announced no new bond-buying at the central bank’s latest meeting. Riskier assets sold off and safe-haven securities benefitted.

But Francesco Garzarelli of Goldman Sachs, Draghi’s former employer, has a different take on the matter:

We see a material change in the central bank’s approach to the crisis, and a coherent interplay between fiscal and monetary policy. The underwhelming part of today’s announcements lies in the lack of details on the asset purchases and other measures to support the private sector. But it appears that these will have more structure around them than the SMP (Securities Markets Program).

That the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insures deposits in people’s bank accounts up to $250,000 is fairly common knowledge. What is less known is that this $250,000 cap is, in many cases, a fiction, because companies and savvy, wealthy depositors can circumvent it, or avoid it altogether.

Two examples of this “the-sky-is-the-limit” insurance are so-called TAG accounts and CDAR accounts. TAG (Transaction Account Guarantee) accounts held about $1.5 trillion as of March 31, according to the FDIC’s latest quarterly banking profile. The accounts pay no interest, so their popularity is derived from their uncapped FDIC insurance which reassures companies who need to keep large amounts of cash at hand to finance inventories and payrolls that their deposits are safe even if something goes wrong at the bank.

The FDIC is funded by the banks it insures. When it closes a bank, it uses money it has already set aside to protect depositors and absorb any losses associated with the failure. TAG accounts were forged in the fire of the 2008 financial crisis by the FDIC, the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve Board and unveiled in a joint press conference.

Barclays was fined a record $450 million last month by U.S. and UK authorities for manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, the interest rate that underpins transactions worth trillions of dollars worldwide, between 2005 and 2009.  More than a dozen banks are expected to be drawn into the scandal, which is being probed by authorities in North America, Europe and Japan.

Below is the fascinating account of a former bank staff who worked alongside money market traders on just how it all went down:

Going back a step … and in many industries still today, there is this truly working concept which is my word is my bond. And that’s how the City used to function before, a long time ago, and in many things, up until very recently.

Chris Reese contributed to this post

In an article entitled “Our financial oligarchy,” published in Harper’s magazine in December 1913, Louis Brandeis, who three years later would be appointed to the Supreme Court, delivered a scathing critique of the banking sector that bears an uncanny resemblance to the charges against Wall Street today.

As the Libor scandal continues to widen, confidence in an already tarnished financial sector has been eroding further, having already taken a beating in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial crisis and the massive Wall Street bailouts that followed. Five years later, banks are still seen as risky as their post-crisis actions not only fail to restore their reputations but actually push them deeper into disrepair.

Against that backdrop, Brandeis’ description of the rapid growth of investment banks and the expansion of their power in ways that make them behave like economically inefficient oligopolies sounds downright prophetic.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke “might have something up his sleeve next week” when he delivers his semi-annual monetary policy report to Congress: he could hint at a “funding for lending” program similar to what the Bank of England announced last month, according to one long-time Fed watcher.

If the Fed wants to ease again, the first lever they pull might not be more quantitative easing where the Fed buys government bonds to help keep interest rates low in the hope that low rates will foster lending and economic growth, says  Decision Economics economist Cary Leahey.

Bernanke is scheduled to testify before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday and in front of the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday.

There appears to have been a significant slowdown in the second quarter. In particular we saw the pace of job creation slowed to a pace of 75,000 per month in the second quarter down from 226,000 in the first quarter and there are also concerns about slowing growth globally, beyond Europe but also in the emerging world and China, which was highlighted in the minutes (to the June meeting) this week. So, where do you think we’re headed? Are we just going to remain in a soft kind of pace? Are there upside risks to growth? Are there downside risks to growth?

Growth has definitely softened. The data are unmistakably weaker in the second quarter than we had hoped they would be. I think everyone recognized the first quarter and the end of last year were a little bit stronger than we might be able to sustain in the middle of the year but it’s definitely come in softer than I’d expected.

At the beginning of the year, it seemed as if Europe wouldn’t maybe weaken as much as we thought but lately the weakening from Europe has been coming online. In the U.S., I think we’re in a situation where we’re going to fluctuate from between the level where we are now to a level that’s more like we saw six or eight months ago. We’re going to have soggy patches, we’re going to have stronger spurts. If you look back over the last three years that’s the record you see. I don’t see a reason for that to change markedly.

Maybe the massive U.S. repo market isn’t as massive as we thought. That’s the conclusion of a study by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that suggests transactions in the repurchase agreement (repo) market total about $5.48 trillion. The figure, though impressive, is a far cry from a previous and oft-cited $10 trillion estimate made in 2010 by two Yale professors, Gary Gorton and Andrew Metrick. The Fed researchers, acknowledging the “spotty data” that complicates such tasks, argue the previous $10-trillion estimate is based on repo activity in 2008 when the market was far larger, and is inflated by double-counting.

Repos are a key source of collateralized funding for dealers and others in financial markets, and represent a main pillar of the “shadow” banking system. The market was central to the downfalls of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns in the 2008 crisis, and now regulators from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke on down are looking for a fix. Earlier this year, the New York Fed itself said it might restrict the types of collateral in so-called tri-party repos, after being dissatisfied with progress by an industry committee.

The study published by the New York Fed on Monday slices the complex market into five segments, mapping the flow of cash and securities among dealers, funds and other players. Because dealers represent about 90 percent of the tri-party market, the Fed study extrapolates that onto the broader repo market, to arrive at its estimates. Bottom lines: U.S. repo transactions total $3.04 trillion; U.S. reverse repo transactions total $2.45 trillion.

Simon Johnson is on a mission. The MIT professor and former IMF economist is trying to push JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to resign his seat on the board of the New York Fed, which regulates his bank. Alternatively, he would like to shame the Federal Reserve into rewriting its code of conduct so that CEOs of banks seen as too big to fail can no longer serve.

Asked about Dimon’s NY Fed seat during testimony this month, Bernanke argued that it was up to Congress to address any perceived conflicts of interest.

But Johnson says the Fed itself should be trying to counter the perception of internal conflicts. He told reporters in a conference call: