Tag Archives: Central Bank

If you have decided to buy gold bullion or to buy silver coins in the last few months then you may have been delighted with how last night’s Fed press conference went. If you’re still wondering if or how to invest in gold then it might be worth paying attention to what central banks are doing in the coming weeks. After all, how do central banks make their decisions when it comes to monetary policy? In years before it might have been quite straightforward...

Inflation! Trading Places! Marc Faber! Chart Watch! That’s right, it’s episode two of The M3 Report. It is finally here, what a great way to set you up for the week ahead. Subscribe here if you’re not already receiving alerts. Our maiden episode was a huge success, and we have really enjoyed hearing everyone’s feedback. We are delighted to see how many new people are discovering the show each day. We really enjoyed making it and that’s why we’ve cracked on and...

Gold price fell to $1,808 an ounce in the wake of the release of the minutes of the December Federal Reserve meeting, having hit an intra-day high of $1,829. Silver price fell to $22.72 an ounce from an intra-day high of $23.26. Gold and silver have continued to sell off this morning with gold trading as low as $1,794 and silver trading down to $22.14. The FOMC minutes showed a much more hawkish Fed than markets had been expecting. The minute suggests that the Fed...

The Economist reports on “The race to redefine cross-border finance:” SWIFT recently launched SWIFT Go for retail payments. FinTech firms often partly bypass SWIFT by aggregating payments first. Ripple evades SWIFT, using a cryptocurrency for international transactions. Credit card companies build infrastructure independent of SWIFT for retail (push) payments initiated by the sender. JPMorgan Chase and a Singaporean bank and Temasek launched Partior for wholesale payments. This...

VoxEU, February 5, 2021. HTML. Based on CEPR DP 15457, I assess possible implications of the introduction of retail CBDC for bank profits. The model implies annual implicit subsidies to U.S. banks of up to 0.8 percent of GDP during the period 1999-2017.

The Economist discusses the risk of CBDC-induced bank disintermediation. Their summary of the 2019 paper by Markus Brunnermeier and myself: If people prefer CBDCS, however, the central bank could in effect pass their funds on to banks by lending to them at its policy interest rate. “The issuance of CBDC would simply render the central bank’s implicit lender-of-last-resort guarantee explicit,” wrote Markus Brunnermeier of Princeton University and Dirk Niepelt of Study Centre Gerzensee...

CEPR Discussion Paper 15457, November 2020. PDF (local copy). We analyze policy in a two-tiered monetary system. Noncompetitive banks issue deposits while the central bank issues reserves and a retail CBDC. Monies differ with respect to operating costs and liquidity. We map the framework into a baseline business cycle model with “pseudo wedges” and derive optimal policy rules: Spreads satisfy modified Friedman rules and deposits must be taxed or subsidized. We generalize the...

Die Volkswirtschaft, 24 July 2020. PDF. Clarifying the connections between outright monetary financing, QE, the distribution of seignorage profits, the relationship between fiscal and monetary policy, and central bank independence. Abstract: Wenn Parlamentarier höhere Gewinnausschüttungen der Nationalbank fordern, Kritiker im Euroraum mehr «Quantitative Easing» oder Helikoptergeld verlangen und andere Stimmen monetäre Staatsfinanzierung monieren, dann steht die Beziehung zwischen...

International Journal of Central Banking. PDF. This paper offers a macroeconomic perspective on the “Reserves for All” (RFA) proposal to let the general public hold electronic central bank money and transact with it. I propose an equivalence result according to which a marginal substitution of outside money (e.g., RFA) for inside money (e.g., deposits) does not affect macroeconomic outcomes. I identify key conditions for equivalence and argue that these conditions likely are...

FAS, 31 May 2020. PDF. Monetary deficit financing is the norm—after all, central banks distribute their profits. Monetary financing occurs in the context of regular open market operations and QE and, hyper charged, with helicopter drops. The question is not whether monetary policy should finance the government, but why it does so, and to what extent. Fiscal and monetary policy are inherently connected; what constitutes monetary policy is defined by objectives....