Since the 1980s, central banks have been increasingly freed from fiscal dominance, the obligation to monetize government debt. The new regime of monetary dominance celebrated the (price) stability benefits of insulating scientific monetary policy from poorly theorized, highly politicized fiscal policy. Yet the growing dominance of the ‘monetary science, fiscal alchemy’ view in both academia and policy circles played a critical role in the rapid rise of shadow banking. The untold story of shadow banking is the story of (failed) attempts to separate monetary from fiscal policy, and of the bordeland that connects them, mapped onto the repo market.
While the state withdrew from economic life, privatizing state-owned enterprises or state banks, and putting macroeconomic governance in the hands of independent central banks, its role in financial life grew bigger. Sovereign debt evolved into the cornerstone of modern financial systems, used as benchmark for pricing private assets, for hedging and as base asset for credit creation via shadow banking. The state’s role as debt issuer, passive and systemic at once, has been reliant, beyond the arithmetic of budget deficits, on the intricate workings of the repo trinity.
The repo trinity captures a consensus in central bank circles emerging after the 1998 Russian crisis, the first systemic crisis of collateral-intensive finance, that financial stability requires liquid government bond markets and liberalized repo markets (fig. 1).
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/08/how-the-fed-promoted-financial-dominance-and-shadow-banking-by-promoting-repo.html
While the state withdrew from economic life, privatizing state-owned enterprises or state banks, and putting macroeconomic governance in the hands of independent central banks, its role in financial life grew bigger. Sovereign debt evolved into the cornerstone of modern financial systems, used as benchmark for pricing private assets, for hedging and as base asset for credit creation via shadow banking. The state’s role as debt issuer, passive and systemic at once, has been reliant, beyond the arithmetic of budget deficits, on the intricate workings of the repo trinity.
The repo trinity captures a consensus in central bank circles emerging after the 1998 Russian crisis, the first systemic crisis of collateral-intensive finance, that financial stability requires liquid government bond markets and liberalized repo markets (fig. 1).
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/08/how-the-fed-promoted-financial-dominance-and-shadow-banking-by-promoting-repo.html
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