IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/mes/challe/v53y2010i3p49-65.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Politics of Paying Interest on Bank Reserves

Author

Listed:
  • Thomas Palley

Abstract

The Federal Reserve has recently activated its newly acquired powers to pay interest on reserves of depository institutions. The Fed maintains that its new policy increases economic efficiency and intends it to play a lead role in the exit from quantitative easing. This paper argues it is a bad policy that has a deflationary bias; is costly to taxpayers, and that cost will increase as normal conditions return; and establishes institutional lock-in that obstructs desirable changes to regulatory policy. The paper recommends repealing the Fed's power to pay interest on bank reserves. Second, the Fed should repeal regulation Q, which prohibits payment of interest on demand deposits. Third, the Fed should immediately implement an alternative system of asset-based reserve requirements (liquidity ratios) that will improve monetary control and can help exit quantitative easing at no cost to the public purse. Now is the optimal time for this change.

Suggested Citation

  • Thomas Palley, 2010. "The Politics of Paying Interest on Bank Reserves," Challenge, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 53(3), pages 49-65.
    • Handle: RePEc:mes:challe:v:53:y:2010:i:3:p:49-65
    DOI: 10.2753/0577-5132530303
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.2753/0577-5132530303
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.2753/0577-5132530303?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Thomas Palley, 2003. "Asset Price Bubbles and the Case for Asset-Based Reserve Requirements," Challenge, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 46(3), pages 53-72.
    2. Olivier Blanchard & Giovanni Dell’Ariccia & Paolo Mauro, 2010. "Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 42(s1), pages 199-215, September.
    3. Thomas Mayer, 1966. "Interest Payments On Required Reserve Balances," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 21(1), pages 116-118, March.
    4. Todd Keister & Antoine Martin & James J. McAndrews, 2008. "Divorcing money from monetary policy," Economic Policy Review, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, vol. 14(Sep), pages 41-56.
    5. Olivier Blanchard & Giovanni Dell'Ariccia & Paolo Mauro, 2010. "Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 42(s1), pages 199-215, September.
    6. Thomas Palley, 2004. "Asset-based reserve requirements: reasserting domestic monetary control in an era of financial innovation and instability," Review of Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 16(1), pages 43-58.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Brett Fiebiger, 2016. "Fiscal Policy, Monetary Policy and the Mechanics of Modern Clearing and Settlement Systems," Review of Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 28(4), pages 590-608, October.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Thomas I. Palley, 2010. "The Troubling Economics and Politics of Paying Interest on Bank Reserves: A Critique of the Federal Reserve’s Exit Strategy," Working Papers wp221, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
    2. Leonardo Villar-Gómez & Javier Gómez & Andrés Murcia Pabón & Wilmar Cabrera & Hernando Vargas, 2023. "The monetary and macroprudential policy framework in Colombia in the last 30 years: lessons learnt and challenges for the future," BIS Papers chapters, in: Bank for International Settlements (ed.), Central banking in the Americas: Lessons from two decades, volume 127, pages 87-112, Bank for International Settlements.
    3. Catherine Mathieu & Henri Sterdyniak, 2010. "European Debt Crisis and Fiscal Exit Strategies," SciencePo Working papers Main hal-01069426, HAL.
    4. Tae-Jeong Kim & Mihye Lee & Robert Dekle, 2014. "The Impact of Population Aging on the Countercyclical Fiscal Stance in Korea, with a Focus on the Automatic Stabilizer," Working Papers 2014-21, Economic Research Institute, Bank of Korea.
    5. Tobias Cwik, 2012. "Fiscal consolidation using the example of Germany," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2012-80, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    6. Swanson, Eric T., 2021. "Measuring the effects of federal reserve forward guidance and asset purchases on financial markets," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 32-53.
    7. Blot, Christophe & Creel, Jérôme & Hubert, Paul & Labondance, Fabien & Saraceno, Francesco, 2015. "Assessing the link between price and financial stability," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 16(C), pages 71-88.
    8. Stijn Claessens & M. Ayhan Kose, 2013. "Financial Crises: Explanations, Types and Implications," CAMA Working Papers 2013-06, Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.
    9. Zhang, Yanbing & Hua, Xiuping & Zhao, Liang, 2011. "Monetary policy and housing prices : a case study of Chinese experience in 1999-2010," BOFIT Discussion Papers 17/2011, Bank of Finland, Institute for Economies in Transition.
    10. repec:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/vbu6kd1s68o6r34k5bcm3iopv is not listed on IDEAS
    11. Aliya Algozhina, 2012. "Monetary and Fiscal Policy Interactions in an Emerging Open Economy: A Non-Ricardian DSGE Approach," CERGE-EI Working Papers wp476, The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague.
    12. Kobayashi, Teruyoshi & Muto, Ichiro, 2013. "A Note On Expectational Stability Under Nonzero Trend Inflation," Macroeconomic Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 17(3), pages 681-693, April.
    13. Pierpaolo Benigno & Luca Antonio Ricci, 2011. "The Inflation-Output Trade-Off with Downward Wage Rigidities," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(4), pages 1436-1466, June.
    14. Gagnon, Marie-Hélène & Gimet, Céline, 2013. "The impacts of standard monetary and budgetary policies on liquidity and financial markets: International evidence from the credit freeze crisis," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 37(11), pages 4599-4614.
    15. David Arseneau, 2012. "Expectation traps in a new Keynesian open economy model," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 49(1), pages 81-112, January.
    16. Wei Dong & Geoffrey Dunbar & Christian Friedrich & Dmitry Matveev & Romanos Priftis & Lin Shao, 2021. "Complementarities Between Fiscal Policy and Monetary Policy—Literature Review," Discussion Papers 2021-4, Bank of Canada.
    17. repec:ilo:ilowps:488129 is not listed on IDEAS
    18. Eckhard Hein, 2016. "Secular stagnation or stagnation policy? Steindl after Summers," PSL Quarterly Review, Economia civile, vol. 69(276), pages 3-47.
    19. Francesco Saraceno, 2015. "Challenges for the ECB in Times of Deflation," Working Papers hal-03470271, HAL.
    20. Piotr Ciżkowicz & Andrzej Rzońca & Andrzej Torój, 2019. "In Search of an Appropriate Lower Bound. The Zero Lower Bound vs. the Positive Lower Bound under Discretion and Commitment," German Economic Review, Verein für Socialpolitik, vol. 20(4), pages 1028-1053, November.
    21. Isabel Correia & Emmanuel Farhi & Juan Pablo Nicolini & Pedro Teles, 2013. "Unconventional Fiscal Policy at the Zero Bound," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 103(4), pages 1172-1211, June.
    22. José Jorge, 2016. "The Shape of Regulation to Come," CEF.UP Working Papers 1602, Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mes:challe:v:53:y:2010:i:3:p:49-65. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/MCHA20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.