April 17, 2011
U.S. economists seem to not understand that central banks can raise reserve requirements as a way to control inflation. This is apparently the reason they find it inconceivable that the Fed could buy and hold large amounts of debt without leading to inflation. If the Fed buys and holds the debt, then the interest on the debt would be paid to the Fed and then refunded to the Treasury. In this way it would impose no net cost to taxpayers.
If the Fed were to buy and hold say $3 trillion of the debt being incurred due to the downturn, then it would reduce the projected interest burden in future years by close to $150 billion a year (@ $1.5 trillion over a decade), a bit less than 1.0 percent of GDP. Given the national obsession with reducing the deficit, it would be reasonable to expect that this would be one of the policies on everyone’s list.
For some reason it is never mentioned. This is presumably because our economists don’t have a very good understanding of economic policy. (They didn’t see the $8 trillion housing bubble that wrecked the economy.)
Therefore, this NYT article on how China is raising reserve requirements to slow inflation should be important news to those in economic policy-making positions. China’s central bankers would probably even be willing to provide tutorials to Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke and others to explain how they are raising reserve requirements. Maybe then this policy could be included on the list of ways to reduce the deficit.
Addendum:
The Fed can buy bonds by printing money. It does this all the time and is actually buying large amounts of money now. The issue is whether it can continue to hold the bonds when the economy starts to recover or whether to prevent inflation, it will have to sell the bonds, thereby pulling money out of circulation.
The fact that China’s central bank seems to understand, which U.S. policy analysts do not, is that raising reserve requirements is an alternative mechanism to pulling money out of the economy by selling bonds. If the reserve requirement is twice as high, it has roughly the same impact as cutting the money supply in half.
Those who think China’s 5.5 percent inflation rate somehow shows that raising reserve requirements is an ineffective policy have to deal with the fact that its central bank has also been trying to reduce the money supply directly. Obviously neither policy has been pursued with sufficient vigor if the goal is to bring down inflation. Of course, the vast majority of people in China would probably prefer something like the 9.0 percent growth it is now enjoying, coupled with 5.5 percent inflation (fueled in large part by rapid wage growth) than a much slower growth rate and lower inflation.
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