Friday, August 27, 2021

These Huge Deficits Wouldn't Be Possible without the Fed's Inflation

While it is no doubt very neat and tidy to think the Fed makes its policies based primarily on economic science, it's more likely that what actually concerns the Fed in 2021 is facilitating deficit spending for Congress and the White House.

The politics of the situation-not to be confused with the economics of the situation-dictate that interest rates be kept low, and this suggests that the Fed will work to keep interest rates low even as price inflation rises and even if it looks like the economy is "Overheating." If we seek to understand the Fed's interest rate policy, it thus may be most fruitful to look at spending policy on Capitol Hill rather than the arcane theories of Fed economists.

What happens to this debt as the Fed buys it up? It ends up in the Fed's portfolio, and the Fed mostly pays for it by using newly created dollars.

Making short shrift of any pretense of fed independence, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau simply decreed that interest rates on the federal debt would be "Pegged."

Accordingly, the Fed soon became a huge buyer of Treasury securities, thereby "Monetizing" federal debt on a scale never before imagined.

In 2010, the Fed held about 10% of all Treasury debt outstanding; today it holds more than 20%. And, as noted by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in May 2020,.

Economists and Fed watchers may pore over Fed documents and Fed commentary to try to figure out how the Fed views the economics of low-interest rate policy.
 

https://mises.org/wire/these-huge-deficits-wouldnt-be-possible-without-feds-inflation 

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