The Fed, a.k.a. the Federal Reserve, is more about easing the money supply...rather than ripping the bandaid off. Quantitative easing is when a central bank, like the Fed, increases the money supply by buying government securities back from the market.
Quantitative Easing, or QE, is considered a kind of last resort in the U.S. You’ll likely only find the Fed pulling the QE wrench out of their monetary policy toolkit if interest rates are already at zero (or near zero). Once interest rates are down as far as they can go, there’s nothing else the Fed can do with interest rates to encourage investing and spending. They’ve made borrowing cheaper...and, yep. That’s about it. And they hope that will result in more people borrowing, which should stimulate the overall economy (employment, spending, all of it).
If the economy is still looking pretty recessionary after pushing interest rates down to zero, then the Fed will do QE. In other countries, QE is a tool the central banks use more often than in the U.S. Like in Japan.
We saw the Fed executing quantitative easing during the Great Recession of 2008. The subprime mortgage crisis took down the entire economy with it, leading to super-low interest rates and QE. Pulling out all the stops.
The reason we should “ease” the money rather than lump-sum it is because increasing the money supply decreases the value of each dollar. That means: inflation nation. Hyperinflation is one of the worst scenarios, where prices climb at an alarming rate, and people stop trusting fiat currency.
The other worst scenario: stagflation. That’s when the central bank has pulled out all the stops to get the economy going again, we’ve got inflation, and yet GDP is still going down. It’s all about...easing into it.
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Finance: What is the Federal Funds Rate?22 Views
Finance a la shmoop what is the federal funds rate? all right think about it like
a suggested tip amount at a restaurant or on uber or lyft and you're going to [Man stood outside Pete's Pizza store]
gauge how your waiter or driver will react to that number
warmly coldly or well that's basically what the federal funds rates intentions
are as it relates to heating up or cooling down the economy well the Fed
heats and cools via the manner in which it rents money to its henchmen, the US
banking system that is in the most basic vanilla transaction the Fed rents money [Briefcase of cash lands outside Federal State building]
to banks for 1% a year and those banks then turn around and market that
money in the form of loans for homes and cars and re rents
that money with a big fat markup at three four five six seven eight percent
or more well a fair number of deadbeats exist on the planet they don't pay back [people appear all across a map of earth]
the money they promised to pay back and while sometimes the bank has to eat the
dough they loaned or at least incur a lot of lawyer bills chasing down the [Lawyer chasing man in a car]
deadbeats and in the event of a calamitous economic situation well,
banks need to be rock-solid so they can't lend out every dollar they have
that is they have to keep a fair amount of equity on their books so that if bad
things really do happen then they have what are called reserves well the bank [Bank reserve vault of cash appears]
also keeps reserves for direct daily deposits so that someday when a bunch of
people come in for their cash the bank can't turn their pockets inside out and [Person turns pocket inside out]
say yeah sorry we gave it all to the nice man wanting to buy a sports car
well that kind of thing leads to panic and disaster and it has sadly in our
country's history when a third of the banks went bankrupt in the Great
Depression so what happens when a bank has less money than it legally needs to
have as a reserve? well it borrows money in a short-term overnight loan from
either the Federal Reserve Bank or from other banks that keep their own reserves [Money transfers from Federal Reserve to bank]
at the Federal Reserve sort of like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul keeping
all that reserve grid number uh steady all right well now
we all know that borrowing money is not free
if a bank borrows overnight from other banks it is charged an interest rate at
the current federal funds rate the Federal Reserve influences that rate
while banks just need to be careful about paying back those loans because
stiffing the Fed is significantly more dangerous to your life than
sniffing your waiter at Applebee's [Object hits man outside Applebee's]
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The Federal Open Market Committee's purpose is to manage financial outcomes through monetary policy.
