Lender Of The Last Resort Quotes

The Fed could not create new money to act as the lender of last resort for failing banks, as new money had to be backed by gold.

From a broader money view perspective, however, September 2008 was the moment when the Fed moved from lender of last resort to dealer of last resort, in effect taking the collapsing wholesale money market onto its own balance sheet. But in the heat of the moment, no one noticed.

In short, there is no question that a country can run a stable paper currency without a gold standard, a central bank, a lender of last resort, or much regulation; and not only avoid disaster, but perform well. Bottom–up monetary systems – known as free banking – have a far better track record than top–down ones. Walter Bagehot, the great nineteenth-century theorist of central banking, admitted as much. In his influential book Lombard Street, he effectively conceded that the only reason a central bank needed to be a lender of last resort was because of the instability introduced by the existence of a central bank. The

euro denominated borrowing was akin to foreign currency debt in traditional sudden stop crises. The natural lender of last resort, the ECB, was explicitly forbidden from playing the role. This ruled out one of the classic ways out of avoiding government default – having the central bank print the money needed to service the debt. The predominance of bank financing was another amplifier of problems. European banks were thinly capitalised and extremely large relative to the countries’ GDP. They were so large that they had to be saved, but their size also created a ‘double drowning’ scenario. This is exactly what happened in Ireland. In what might be called a tragic double-drowning scenario, Ireland’s banking system went down first, and the government of Ireland went down trying to save it.

the consequences of this state of affairs have been drawn by the Hungarian-born American financier George Soros who, in an essay published in September 2012 (Soros 2012), argued that in order to avoid a definitive split of the euro zone into creditor and debtor countries, and thus a likely collapse of the EU itself, Germany must resolve a basic dilemma: either assume the role of the ‘benevolent hegemon’ or else leave the euro zone. If Germany were to give up the euro, leaving the euro zone in the hands of the debtor countries, all problems that now appear to be insoluble, could be resolved through currency depreciation, improved competitiveness, and a new status of the ECB as lender of last resort. The common market would survive, but the relative position of Germany and of other creditor countries that might wish to leave the euro zone would change from the winning to the losing side. Both groups of countries could avoid such problems if only Germany was willing to assume the role of a benevolent hegemon. However, this would require the more or less equal treatment of debtor and creditor countries, and a much higher rate of growth, with consequent inflation. These may well be unacceptable conditions for the German leaders, for the Bundesbank and, especially, for the German voters.

When the Eurozone was started, a fundamental stabilising force that existed at the level of the member-states was taken away from these countries. This is the lender of last resort function of the central bank.” EZ governments, “could no longer guarantee that the cash would always be available to roll over the government debt.” Unlike stand-alone nations, EZ members did not have “the power to force the central bank to provide liquidity in times of crisis.” This created a fundamental fragility in the monetary union. Without a buyer-of-last-resort, shocks that provide re-funding difficulties in banks or nations can trigger self-fulfilling liquidity crises that degenerate into solvency problems.

Minsky’s view, the central bank really cannot control the money supply. The problem is that attempts to constrain reserves only induce bank innovations that ultimately require lender of last resort interventions and even bailouts that validate riskier practices. Together

the Bank’s proper role in a crisis as the ‘lender of last resort’, to lend freely, albeit at a penalty rate, to combat liquidity crises.42

and stood ready to serve as a lender of last resort if needed.

If banks won’t borrow because they fear that doing so might send a bad signal about their financial health, then having a lender of last resort does little good.

When in trouble, commercial banks could turn to the Federal Reserve as their lender of last resort.

thereby serving as lender of last resort.

The president’s next sentence was boring but extraordinarily important: “The Federal Reserve is also taking steps to provide additional liquidity to money-market mutual funds, which will help ease pressure on our financial markets.” This was the other half of the money bargain, previously only available to banks: the Fed as lender of last resort. Now, the president was saying, the Fed stood ready to lend against the commercial paper that the money-market funds held and that nobody, but nobody, wanted to buy.

Bear Stearns wasn’t a commercial bank. It didn’t hold deposits for regular people and wasn’t supposed to be able to borrow from the Fed. But the Fed invoked a legal provision that said it could lend to anyone in “unusual and exigent circumstances,” and loaned $13 billion to Bear. The Fed was following Walter Bagehot’s nineteenth-century advice to “lend to merchants, to minor bankers, to ‘this man and that man.’” The central bank was pouring money into the shadow bank run, acting as lender of last resort.

This unprecedented package finally forced the Fed to fulfill its role as lender of last resort to the banking system.

Sharp drops in the money supply then led to severe recessions. The country needed an elastic currency and a permanent lender of last resort.

But this work paled in comparison to the force and impact of A Monetary History of the United States. What had begun as a favor to Arthur Burns had become a book that would turn the conventional wisdom of academic economists, policy-makers, and politicians alike upside down. The American Historical Review put it simply: “This is one of the most important books of our time.”39 Friedman and Schwartz presented voluminous data on nearly a century of U.S. history; but beyond piling up facts, they also advanced a theory of how money worked in the economy. How did money affect business cycles? Friedman and Schwartz had an answer they considered definitive: money mattered. It was the hidden force behind the ups and downs, the breadlines and the bubbles. Friedman knew the book would make an impact. He knew it was the best work he had ever done, or would ever do. He knew that for all his deviationist politics, for all the force of Keynesian assumption, for all the habitual scorn heaped upon the quantity theory of money, their book would have to be answered. It would compel conversation. The book’s centerpiece was its stunning analysis of the Great Depression. Friedman and Schwartz’s data showed a precipitous 33 percent decline in the quantity of money during what they called “the great contraction.” They convincingly argued that this lack of money transformed an unremarkable dip in the business cycle into a crisis of global proportions. Here was a provocative new explanation for a disaster that continued to cast its shadow across the century. But threaded through the economic argument was another thesis. In 1914, the United States had created a central bank system designed expressly to stabilize the economy. As the lender of last resort, the Federal Reserve Board could have opened the spigots and flooded the economy with cash. Why did it fail to do so?

I worked for one of those who pushed back against the majority. He was the lone member of the FOMC who voted against the professor’s theories at that fateful meeting. He fought the good but lonely fight, and I, in my capacity as trusted adviser, waged many a battle with him. But the sad truth is we lost the people’s war. In a world rendered unsafe by banks that were too big to fail, we came to understand the Fed was simply too big to fight. I wrote this book to tell from the inside the story of how the Fed went from being lender of last resort to savior—and then destroyer—of America’s economic system.

On October 29, 2008, came an announcement: “Today, the Federal Reserve, the Banco Central do Brasil, the Banco de Mexico, the Bank of Korea, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore are announcing the establishment of temporary reciprocal currency arrangements.” Since its founding, the Federal Reserve had been the lender of last resort for the United States. In late 2008, Ben Bernanke’s Fed became the lender of last resort to much of the world.

The economy and financial markets are becoming global, while monetary policy and financial supervision and regulation are conducted at the country level by national authorities. This is what the sovereign state is all about. For the foreseeable future, it is unrealistic to imagine that the authorities in large countries will conduct monetary policy or financial supervision and regulation for the sake of global stability. The gap between the reality of the global economy and the policy-making institutions is the essential source of the problem we are faced with for many decades to come. Most problems derive from the fact that (1) central banks lack the incentive to 'internalize' the international spillover from their own conduct of monetary policy, (2) there is no global lender of last resort that is really worthy of that title, and (3) financial institutions tend to consume the services of financial stability excessively by not internalizing the impact of their own behavior on financial stability - the 'tragedy of the commons.

Oddly, the United States came rather late into the picture. It was only in 1913, thanks to the efforts of J. P. Morgan, that it got its own central bank, and called it the Federal Reserve Board or the Fed. The Fed would be the ‘lender of last resort’—to save greedy banks which had gone bust—something that happened all too often then.

As a lender of last resort, the House of Morgan favored like-minded institutions of similar character and background. Kidder, Peabody was just such a firm. It didn’t hustle business or steal clients and always played by Morgan rules. In 1930, it was hit by multiple blows. The Italian government removed $8 million in deposits, and the new Bank for International Settlements instructed Kidder to switch big sums to a Swiss bank. This led to another rescue at Jack Morgan’s home, chaired by George Whitney, who had started his career as a Kidder clerk. The House of Morgan arranged a $10-million line of credit. Under Whitney’s tutelage, the old Kidder, Peabody was folded.

While the Fed is usually identified as the Lender of Last Resort (LLR) in the United States, the LLR function is actually shared by the Fed and FDIC.