Just a few days after the San Fran Fed, that incubator of profound economic insight and blatantly money-wasting research which recently found that record amounts in student loans, wait for it, prevent young people from buying homes, casually tossed a bomb in academia when it said that negative rates would have accelerated the recovery from the last recession setting up a strawman to use NIRP during the next recession, just dumped another bombshell.
Speaking to reporters on Friday, Reuters reports that San Fran Fed President Mary Daly said that US central bankers are currently debating whether it should confine its controversial tool of bond buying to purely emergency situations or if it should turn to that tool more regularly.
“In the financial crisis, in the aftermath of that when we were trying to help the economy, we engaged in these quantitative easing policies, and an important question is, should those always be in the tool kit — should you always have those at your ready — or should you think about those are only tools you use when you really hit the zero lower bound and you have no other things you can do,” Daly said after a talk at the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.
So how would the Fed decided which “tool” to use when? Well, according to Daly the answer wasn’t clear: “you could imagine executing policy with your interest rate as your primary tool and the balance sheet as a secondary tool, but one that you would use more readily,” she added. “That’s not decided yet, but it’s part of what we are discussing now.”
So while it remains unclear what “more regularly” means, one proposal which we are confident will be adopted by the Fed is the following:
The year is 2021. The Fed institutes QE every time the S&P drops 50bps
— Hipster (@Hipster_Trader) February 8, 2019
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2SGmjOA Tyler Durden