Учебники по экономике учат, что ведет. Банки увеличивают свои резервы; используя кредитное плечо вкладывают их в экономику и способствуют росту экономической активности, за которой следует рост инфляции. Конечно, именно это Бен Бернанке имел в виду, когда запускал все новые программы экономического стимулирования. Но последние годы вносят коррективы в экономические знания.
В жизни все оказывается по-другому. Денежный мультипликатор – это миф. Если нажать до пола на педаль газа машины, в двигателе которой не работает половина цилиндров, поедет ли она от этого быстрее?
И это ставит под вопрос сам смысл программ количественного смягчения. Кроме роста цен и увеличения дисбалансов это ни к чему не ведет.
Did Hell freeze over and I missed it??
Seth B. Carpenter and Selva Demiralp, recently posted a discussion paper on the Federal Reserve Board’s website, titled Money, Reserves, and the Transmission of Monetary Policy: Does the Money Multiplier Exist?
The authors note that bank reserves increased dramatically since the start of the financial crisis. Reserves are up a staggering 2,173% from $47.3bn on September 10, 2008, just before the financial crisis began, to $1.1tn now. Yet M2 is up only 11.4% since September 10, 2008, and bank loans are down $140.2bn. The textbook money multiplier model predicts that money growth and bank lending should have soared along with reserves, stimulating economic activity and boosting inflation. The Fed study concluded that “if the level of reserves is expected to have an impact on the economy, it seems unlikely that a standard multiplier story will explain the effect.”
That not only repudiates the textbook money multiplier model but also raises lots of questions about the goal of the Fed’s quantitative easing policies.
The Carpenter/Demiralp study quotes former Fed Vice Chairman Donald Kohn saying the following about the money multiplier in a March 24, 2010 speech (here):
“The huge quantity of bank reserves that were created has been seen largely as a byproduct of the purchases that would be unlikely to have a significant independent effect on financial markets and the economy. This view is not consistent with the simple models in many textbooks or the monetarist tradition in monetary policy, which emphasizes a line of causation from reserves to the money supply to economic activity and inflation. . . . We will need to watch and study this channel carefully.”
Here are more shocking revelations from the study under review: “In the absence of a multiplier, open market operations, which simply change reserve balances, do not directly affect lending behavior at the aggregate level. Put differently, if the quantity of reserves is relevant for the transmission of monetary policy, a different mechanism must be found.
The sad thing here is that there are people in the Fed who KNOW this. They understand it. Yet, here we are implementing policy that many of them know will never work. It’s unbelievable. In other words, QE will fail and the Fed will continue to push on a string. The Fed is impotent. I think they’re just jawboning at this point.
Последний абзац заслуживает перевода.
Самое досадное, что есть люди в Феде, которые знают это. Они понимают это. Они понимают, что осуществляют политику, которая никогда не работает. Это невероятно. Другими словами, QE не работает, а Фед продолжает гнуть свою линию. Фед – импотент. Я думаю, что у них должны сжиматься зубы от этой мысли.
The role of reserves and money in macroeconomics has a long history. Simple textbook treatments of the money multiplier give the quantity of bank reserves a causal role in determining the quantity of money and bank lending and thus the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. This role results from the assumptions that reserve requirements generate a direct and tight linkage between money and reserves and that the central bank controls the money supply by adjusting the quantity of reserves through open market operations. Using data from recent decades, we have demonstrated that this simple textbook link is implausible in the United States for a number of reasons. First, when money is measured as M2, only a small portion of it is reservable and thus only a small portion is linked to the level of reserve balances the Fed provides through open market operations. Second, except for a brief period in the early 1980s, the Fed has traditionally aimed to control the federal funds rate rather than the quantity of reserves. Third, reserve balances are not identical to required reserves, and the federal funds rate is the interest rate in the market for all reserve balances, not just required reserves. Reserve balances are supplied elastically at the target funds rate. Finally, reservable liabilities fund only a small fraction of bank lending and the evidence suggests that they are not the marginal source data for the most liquid and well-capitalized banks. Changes in reserves are unrelated to changes in lending, and open market operations do not have a direct impact on lending. We conclude that the textbook treatment of money in the transmission mechanism can be rejected. Specifically, our results indicate that bank loan supply does not respond to changes in monetary policy through a bank lending channel, no matter how we group the banks.
