Quote:
Originally Posted by spence
If we give the banks money in the form of deposits the banks will be able to lower interest rates and give out tons of loans. If we give the banks a lot of money they will lower rates to zero and we will have unlimited growth.
Make that wrong.
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The Federal Reserve's program of quantitative easing created an artificial bubble of bank reserves for which the Fed paid a secured higher interest to the banks than the banks could get from less secure loans to the private sector at the lower interest dictated by the Federal Reserve's low benchmark interest rates.
That coupled with the economic downturn after 2008 which lowered the demand for loans, made it more profitable for the banks to lend less to the private sector and depend more on the Fed interest payments to them on the money it was holding for them, and so was not being released at normal volume into the market in the forms of loans to the private sector.
This intrusion by the Fed Reserve distorted the normal relationship of bank deposits to loans. It created a huge bubble of artificial bank reserves, not related to market activity, which can create massive inflation when that reserve is released into the market. The economy has recovered since then and the demand for loans is rising, and expected to rise more if the public confidence in the economy remains. There may be a tricky balance for the banks in taking on a great amount of public deposits to add to their reserve bubble which could infuse too much money into the economy and cause the feared inflation. In any event, the market will have to correct for the ill conceived bubble created by massive quantitative easing. Let's hope it doesn't provoke another crash.
Eventually, when things return to normal, if they do, then private deposits to banks will again create the reserve they need to make loans.