• About Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact
Mortgage Insurance Center
  • Home
  • Mortgages
  • Health Insurance
  • Home Insurance
  • Life insuranace
  • Finance Laws
    • Banking Laws
    • Assets
    • Interest Rate
    • Loans
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Mortgages
  • Health Insurance
  • Home Insurance
  • Life insuranace
  • Finance Laws
    • Banking Laws
    • Assets
    • Interest Rate
    • Loans
No Result
View All Result
Mortgage Insurance Center
No Result
View All Result
Home Interest Rate

Higher Interest Rates Raise Risk of Future Fed Losses

by Staff
May 23, 2022
in Interest Rate
0
Higher Interest Rates Raise Risk of Future Fed Losses
0
SHARES
5
VIEWS
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

[ad_1]

The break-even level of the Federal Reserve's benchmark rate is around 3.5%, according to economist projections.  REUTERS
The break-even level of the Federal Reserve’s benchmark rate is around 3.5%, according to economist projections.  REUTERS

The Federal Reserve’s plans to raise interest rates aggressively to combat high inflation could have an overlooked and uncomfortable side effect for the central bank: capital losses.

The potential for losses hinges on obscure monetary plumbing.

The Fed’s $9 trillion portfolio, sometimes called a balance sheet, is full of mostly interest-bearing assets — Treasury and mortgage-backed securities — with an average yield of 2.3%.

On the other side of the ledger — the liability side of the Fed’s balance sheet — are bank deposits held at the Fed known as reserves, which are also interest bearing, as well as currency in circulation.

In the old days before the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed kept its portfolio relatively small, at less than $1 trillion. Its main liability was the amount of money in circulation.

The Fed shifted reserves up and down in incremental amounts if it wanted to lower or raise short-term interest rates.

That crisis changed everything.

The Fed cut interest rates to zero and purchased large quantities of bonds, flooding the banking system with reserves to support the economy.

The Fed also revamped the way it managed interest rates. With a large portfolio, it left the banking system flush with more reserves and switched to a new system of controlling short-term rates by paying interest on those reserves.

The central bank aggressively ramped up this type of help for the economy again when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020. The balance sheet had nearly doubled when officials ended such purchases this past March.

For the past decade, one side effect of its new approach for controlling interest rates was that, because of relatively low short-term rates, the Fed earned more money on its securities than it paid to banks as interest on reserves.

Every year, the Fed handed over the surplus to the Treasury Department after covering its operating expenses. This March, it remitted $109 billion to the government from its earnings in 2021.

But if the Fed now has to raise interest rates a lot to fight inflation, “they’ll have losses,” said William English, a former senior Fed economist who is now a professor at the Yale School of Management.

When exactly that occurs depends on the level of rates and the size of the balance sheet — specifically, the point where it pays more in interest on its $3.4 trillion in reserves than it earns on the $8.5 trillion in securities it owns.

For now, that break-even level of the Fed’s benchmark rate — the point at which the Fed would pay more in interest than it earns — is around 3.5%, according to projections from economists at Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley.

The federal-funds rate is currently in a range between 0.75% and 1%, and investors in interest-rate futures markets currently expect rates to rise above 3% in about a year.

The Fed is set to begin shrinking its asset portfolio next week by allowing more securities to mature without reinvesting the proceeds into new ones.

Over time, that will help minimize the prospect for losses because it will reduce the amount of interest-bearing reserves at the Fed, said Seth Carpenter, global chief economist at Morgan Stanley.

So what happens if the Fed runs a loss? The central bank can’t run out of money. It wouldn’t have to turn to Congress, hat in hand. Instead, it would relabel such a loss by creating a new entry on its balance sheet called a “deferred asset.”

In years where the Fed again has a surplus, it wouldn’t hand over surpluses to the Treasury Department until it had first paid itself back, erasing the deferred asset.

Would this constrain the Fed’s operations? No. Losses have “no direct implication for monetary policy,” said Matthew Luzzetti, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank.

But it could create a political headache for the central bank — potentially at a time of growing unhappiness with the Fed if, for example, inflation stays high or if the Fed’s efforts to combat rising prices puts the economy into a slump.

The prospect of capital losses could have implications both in the short run and beyond.

Officials have discussed potentially selling mortgage-backed securities in the future to more quickly accomplish their objective of holding mostly Treasurys on its balance sheet. But any such sales could incur losses because the value of those bonds has fallen with the Fed signaling higher rates ahead.

Those losses “would not entail any operational challenges” but “would pose communications challenges,” Cleveland Fed president Loretta Mester said at a conference earlier this month.

Mr. Carpenter, a former Fed economist, said central bank officials aren’t likely to “intentionally make a bad policy decision to avoid having losses.”

But he said that when forced to choose between two policy options that would have roughly equivalent economic outcomes, “you might choose the one that doesn’t give you the headache of having to explain why you had losses.”

Over the longer term, capital losses could underscore a risk of the Fed’s asset purchases that some critics of those purchases say ought to make the Fed more skeptical about their use going forward.

“Because this is a real cost to taxpayers, you’ve taken on real risk. That risk is a cost that should be considered,” said Bill Nelson, chief economist at the Bank Policy Institute, an industry group.

If Congress gives the Fed grief around declining income, or threatens its operational independence, then Fed officials in the future could become less willing to use those tools as aggressively as they have in the past.

Briefing memos and transcripts of Fed policy meetings 10 years ago, when officials embarked on what was then their largest bond-buying stimulus program, show that concerns about the political fallout from potential losses factored into debates over how to manage the runoff of the Fed’s balance sheet.

At a December 2012 meeting, Fed chairman Jerome Powell, who was then a governor, flagged one hazard: that the Fed could end up paying billions of dollars of interest to our largest financial institutions and nothing to the taxpayer in a time of fiscal austerity. “To me, that’s a whole lot more than a communications problem.”

At the same meeting, Janet Yellen, who was then the Fed’s vice chairwoman and is now Treasury secretary, conceded the risk but pointed to greater harm if the Fed didn’t secure its economic objectives.

“Losses on the central bank’s balance sheet can raise questions among politicians and the public about a central bank’s performance,” she said. “But prolonged failure to meet the central bank’s mandate can be just as damaging to its reputation and independence.”

With inflation today running far above from the Fed’s 2% target, Mr. Powell and his colleagues are likely to take the same attitude today that Ms. Yellen did 10 years ago.

[ad_2]

Source link

Previous Post

Home Insurance Claim Denied? Here’s How to Dispute It

Next Post

Fairway adds Canzanella to reverse mortgage business development role

Next Post
Fairway adds Canzanella to reverse mortgage business development role

Fairway adds Canzanella to reverse mortgage business development role

Popular Posts

Ajanta Pharma : Newspaper Advertisements
Life insuranace

Taiming Assurance Broker : Announcement on behalf of the major subsidiary Link-Aim Life Insurance Broker Co.,LTD. to distribute dividends.

by Staff
July 28, 2022
0

Close Provided by: TAIMING ASSURANCE BROKER CO.,LTD. SEQ_NO 4 Date of...

Read more

Taiming Assurance Broker : Announcement on behalf of the major subsidiary Link-Aim Life Insurance Broker Co.,LTD. to distribute dividends.

20% interest rate on credit cards! Here’s how to avoid paying those high rates :: WRAL.com

Sens. Murphy, Blumenthal, Colleagues Reintroduce the Behavioral Health Coverage Transparency Act – InsuranceNewsNet

$1 billion in loans still available for agricultural funding in Ohio

How Long Do Car Accidents Stay on Your Record?

Rocket Mortgage Classic Wagers: Pick To Finish Top-10

Load More

Popular Posts

The perks and pitfalls of adjustable-rate mortgages in 2022

by Staff
June 13, 2022
0

Ajanta Pharma : Newspaper Advertisements

Taiming Assurance Broker : Announcement on behalf of the major subsidiary Link-Aim Life Insurance Broker Co.,LTD. to distribute dividends.

by Staff
July 28, 2022
0

Propy introduces blockchain title and escrow service

Propy introduces blockchain title and escrow service

by Staff
May 26, 2022
0

Ajanta Pharma : Newspaper Advertisements

Taiming Assurance Broker : Announcement on behalf of the major subsidiary Link-Aim Life Insurance Broker Co.,LTD. to distribute dividends.

July 28, 2022

20% interest rate on credit cards! Here’s how to avoid paying those high rates :: WRAL.com

July 28, 2022
Edelweiss General Insurance launches India’s first on-demand, mobile telematics-based comprehensive motor insurance – SWITCH

Sens. Murphy, Blumenthal, Colleagues Reintroduce the Behavioral Health Coverage Transparency Act – InsuranceNewsNet

July 28, 2022

Categories

  • Assets
  • Banking Laws
  • Finance Laws
  • Health Insurance
  • Home Insurance
  • Interest Rate
  • Life insuranace
  • Loans
  • Mortgages

Tags

home loans mortgage personal loan
  • Privacy Policy
  • contact us

© 2025 JNews - Premium WordPress news & magazine theme by Jegtheme.

No Result
View All Result
  • About Us
  • contact us
  • Home
  • Home 2
  • Home 3
  • Privacy Policy

© 2025 JNews - Premium WordPress news & magazine theme by Jegtheme.