Friday, September 20, 2019

A source of inertia in excess reserves

Excess reserves collect the IOER which otherwise goes to a seigniorage fee. The seigniorage fee, r monopoly tax, is not unnoticeable in the bond trading desk. So excess reserves will be responding, in part, to the under or over flow of the seigniorage tax. That is a loop, when the investment desk captures the price of the loop then it becomes inertia, has momentum, slows down Fed response times.

The investment desk would vie this as a retail tax on cash, part of the ATM fee, and the derivative is easily calculated, likely a half point is acceptable.  This is a boundary condition, thus has node space on the generator, in quantum mechanic world. Thus the Fed, which has the job of matching generators, will necessarily collect the tax, ultimately.

In the animal spirits market, say sandbox, the bankers would expect the Fed to regurgitate most of those gains back on the market as losses. Treasury would collect the tax at the point of sale, transaction costs being nil.  The defaults are separate, the defaults are simply bigger this time because the "this time is different' fraud was bigger, it doesn't have a gold standard to hide behind.

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