Courtesy of Pam Martens
Fed Chair Jerome Powell (left) and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin
When both parties in Congress came together in March to pass the CARES Act, which was signed into law by President Trump on March 27, the clear intention of the legislation was for the U.S. Treasury to hand over $454 billion of taxpayers’ money to the Federal Reserve. The Fed, in turn, was to leverage the money by 10 times to approximately $4.54 trillion to deploy to keep the economy moving, credit flowing, workers employed and businesses alive until the pandemic had been brought under control.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell made an unprecedented appearance on the Today show on March 26 and explained the plan like this:
“In certain circumstances like the present, we do have the ability to essentially use our emergency lending authorities and the only limit on that will be how much backstop we get from the Treasury Department. We’re required to get full security for our loans so that we don’t lose money. So the Treasury puts up money as we estimate what the losses might be…Effectively $1 of loss absorption of backstop from Treasury is enough to support $10 of loans.”
But according to the latest H.4.1 release from the Federal Reserve (and backed up by recent Senate Testimony), six months after the CARES Act was signed into law, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has handed only $114 billion of the $454 billion over to the Fed. That leaves $340 billion allocated by Congress unaccounted for. (See Paragraph 5 (Liabilities) and the related footnote 14 at this link on the Fed’s H.4.1 release.)
The Federal Reserve’s H.4.1 release shows that the $114 billion it has received thus far from the Treasury has been allocated as follows: $10 billion to the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF); $37.5 billion to the Corporate Credit Facilities; $37.5 billion to the Main Street Facilities; $17.5 billion to the Municipal Liquidity Facility; $10 billion to the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF II); and $1.5 billion to the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility.
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