The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is boosting the amount of temporary liquidity it is willing to make available to financial markets starting this week, the bank said on Wednesday.
It said that as of Thursday, the minimum size of its overnight repurchase-agreement, or repo, operations will rise to $120 billion, from what had been at least $75 billion. Longer-term operations will rise from a minimum daily offering size of $35 billion and go up to $45 billion in interventions scheduled for Thursday and Oct. 29. The longer-term repo operations are scheduled to carry over into November.
The Fed said it was raising the minimum operation sizes “to mitigate the risk of money market pressures that could adversely affect policy implementation.”
Fed repo operations add liquidity to financial markets by loaning cash to eligible banks in return for taking in Treasury debt, which effectively functions as collateral for the loans. The Fed restarted large-scale repo operations a month ago when confronted with unexpectedly big swings in money market borrowing rates.
Interest rates spiked ahead of the September Federal Open-Market Committee meeting for a number of factors. Much of it was due to tax payments and Treasury debt settlements. But as part of an effort to tamp down on market volatility, the New York Fed have made large-scale repos a regular occurrence again.
We could use a little inflation. That is great for those of use with fixed rate debt instruments at low rates.
The problem seems to be that there’s no cash out there in bank-world. In the good old days, banks could only lend around 75-80% of their deposits; now it’s up to 110%.
K, we’ll agree to disagree about your wish for inflation. When gasoline, electricity, and groceries become far more expensive, frills and fripperies such as fast food are……….ahhh……….secondary. Think about that…..