Courtesy of Mish.
The Fed believes that holding interest rates low fosters business growth, hiring, and bank lending?
So why isn’t that happening? I have discussed many reasons, but today I have another one from Steve H. Hanke, Professor of Applied Economics at The Johns Hopkins University who discusses The Federal Reserve vs. Small Business.
Hanke notes that one of the consequences of low interest rates is that “banks with excess reserves are reluctant to part with them for virtually no yield in the interbank market.”
And why should they? Why take risk for nothing?
Interbank Lending
Banks Unwilling to Retain Loans
Hanke Writes ….
Without the security provided by a reliable interbank lending market, banks have been unwilling to scale up or even retain their forward loan commitments. This was verified in a recent article in Central Banking Journal by Stanford Economist Prof. Ronald McKinnon – appropriately titled “Fed ‘stimulus’ chokes indirect finance to SMEs.” The result, as Prof. McKinnon puts it, has been “constipation in domestic financial intermediation” – in other words, a credit crunch.
When banks put the brakes on lending, it is small and medium enterprises that are the hardest hit. Whereas large corporate firms can raise funds directly from the market, SMEs are often primarily reliant on bank lending for working capital. The current drought in the interbank market, and associated credit crunch, has thus left many SMEs without a consistent source of funding.
As it turns out, these “small” businesses make up a big chunk of the U.S. economy – 49.2% of private sector employment and 46% of private-sector GDP. Indeed, the untold story is that the zero-interest-rate trap has left SMEs in a financial straightjacket.
In short, the Fed’s zero interest-rate policy has exacerbated a credit crunch that has been holding back the economy.
Impossible to Prove…
