Any day now, the Federal Reserve will start making loans to small and medium-sized businesses, breaking new ground with its Section 13(3) lending authority. Yet this won't be the first time the Fed set its sights on Main Street businesses. In this post, I'll first review the…
They say that a bad penny always turns up. But when it comes to crises these days, it seems that what keeps turning up is a bad idea—namely, the idea of having the U.S. Mint strike one or more trillion-dollar platinum coins. As I explained last March,…
The Community Reinvestment Act is supposed to ensure that banks lend to low- and moderate-income households wherever they operate. But there are reasons to doubt its effectiveness. In the Washington Post this summer, I reported findings (from a forthcoming paper with Andrew Forrester) that more than two-thirds…
On November 12th I wrote a longish post explaining how growth fluctuations in two of the Federal Reserve's less-familiar liabilities—the foreign repo pool (FRP) and the Treasury General Account (TGA)—had contributed to a shortage of bank reserves that in turn caused repo rates to spike. I followed…
In a post published here in mid-November, I traced the Fed's repo-market troubles to post-2008 changes in the importance and volatility of two of the Fed's non-reserve liabilities: TGA balances and the foreign repo pool. Then, in a companion piece, I made some suggestions for reining-in those…