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The Fed has now accumulated almost 190bn$ of losses, which effectively amounts to a stealth bailout of the banking system. (fred.stlouisfed.org)

submitted 3 months ago by yogthos@lemmy.ml to c/usa@lemmy.ml

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The Federal Reserve is implementing a 'soft landing' strategy that prioritizes big businesses and financial interests over the working majority, in contrast to 2008 when the market crashed and bailouts favored large corporations at the expense of taxpayers. The current approach involves protecting these interests upfront, ensuring their stability during this economic downturn.

Fed “losses” are banks “gains” in terms of revenues, that ultimately become net income and turn into capital. The fed bought up overpriced bonds from financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, which wasn't a significant issue when interest rates were under their control between 2008 and 2022. However, the loss of credibility on inflation led to rate hikes, causing accumulated losses.

The Fed chairman has stated that small businesses will suffer while big businesses remain strong due to their cash reserves. This strategy comes at a significant cost for average individuals who may face unemployment and potential loss of homes as they bear the brunt of the economic fallout.

Rate hikes and macro-management of money markets are designed to make borrowing expensive, protect big banks, and reduce demand by pushing small and mid-cap stocks into bankruptcy. This approach seems poised to result in further consolidation and monopolization of capital.

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[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Rate hikes are also squeezing debtors in the global South by jacking up the interest on their loans. This makes high interest rates a factor of underdevelopment, forcing neocolonies deeper into debt.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Absolutely, I think the countries in the Global South should just default on their western debt and get refinanced by the BRICS.

[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

They'll have to, but that invites reprisal from the hegemon. Already 2/3rds of countries have some form of sanctions, though, so that tool is probably not going to be too effective moving forward.

Which means war is back on the table.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Right, once you sanction enough countries, then you end up sanctioning yourself. Hence why western economies are in a tailspin now. The war could be back on the table, but here too the west has a problem of having become deindustrialized. As far as I know, the current situation is historically unprecedented. Never has an empire outsourced so much of its production capacity to countries that are now becoming its rivals. It's not clear to me how the west can solve this problem since you can't just magically will skilled labor and factories into existence. It's going to be a decades long project even if there was a serious commitment to doing that. Meanwhile, the rest of the world isn't going to be standing still during that time either.

[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I was listening to something the other day about the onshoring attempts for chip production and I was struck by how there's just no skilled labor for doing any of this shit. When I took a semester of carpentry classes my prof always said that we won't really understand the job until we get experience, and until then we'll be "dumb college kids". It made me think of that - we have electronics engineers and software engineers and whatnot, but no one knows how to use the actual machines to do real work.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 months ago

Oh yeah, the attempts to build chip fabs in US is a perfect illustration of the problem. This is another one, Raytheon has to pull retirees back because the skills just don't exist in the new generation. I get the impression that most people don't realize just how monumental of a problem this is.

https://www.defenseone.com/business/2023/06/raytheon-calls-retirees-help-restart-stinger-missile-production/388067/

[–] mephiska@fedia.io 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's not a "stealth bailout." This is the result of the fed owning long maturity assets bought when rates were low, while the fed is now paying higher interest on the overnight bank deposits to keep rates high to control inflation. In 2018 this was predicted to happen if rates needed to be raised (ie to control inflation).

Here is the actual context for that chart

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2023/nov/fed-remittances-treasury-explaining-deferred-asset

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The US Treasury is effectively the owner of the Federal Reserve's entire balance sheet. Any profit or loss resulting from the Fed's monetary policy actions flows back to the Treasury.

For a long time, the Fed's income from holding Treasury debt and fees from financial institutions outweighed its expenses (like interest paid on reserves and operational costs).

However, when the Fed raised interest rates on reserves from near 0% to around 5% in 2021-2022, its expenses surged. This was because the Fed had trillions of dollars in reserve liabilities after years of Quantitative Easing (QE) – buying Treasury bonds and Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) to stimulate the economy.

Reserves are liabilities with variable interest rates, so the Fed's expenses rose immediately. Meanwhile, its assets (mainly Treasury securities and MBS) pay fixed interest, so their income didn't increase.

Here's the problem: the value of the Fed's assets fell when it raised interest rates. This normally wouldn't be a major issue, as the Fed could just hold those assets until maturity and receive their full value. However, the Fed has been shrinking its balance sheet via Quantitative Tightening (QT) - selling these securities back into the market at a loss.

The overall impact is that the non-government sector now has more claims on the government than before. Essentially, the government spent money into the economy, exchanged that spending for Treasury bonds, the Fed bought those bonds, and is now selling them back at a loss

The key takeaway is that the Fed's decisions to raise interest rates and conduct QT have increased the government's overall interest expenses. This leaves less room for non-inflationary public spending on vital areas like healthcare, education, infrastructure, and so on.

[–] mephiska@fedia.io 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

None of that really matters because the fed doesn't mark to market, and losses the fed takes doesn't matter. If anything the current situation means the fed isn't giving it's "profit" to the treasury anymore. It can eat losses because the cash account on the fed balance sheet might as well be an infinity symbol.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Except that's not true because fed still allocates debt payments which reduces the actual operational budget. As more currency is issued, the debt payment portion of the budget continues to climb, which was the last point in my previous reply. This matters quite a bit in practice.

[–] mephiska@fedia.io 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The fed and it's balance sheet is independent from the treasury and it creates and destroys money at will. Where do you think all that Quantitative Easing money came from? It wasn't an act of congress to allocate the cash, it wasn't the treasury issuing bonds. What happens to the money the fed receives when the QE bonds it's holding mature? If the fed doesn't reinvest it, that money is effectively removed from the money supply. The fed doesn't issue anything when it creates currency. It's all accounting.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago

I mean sure, it's all accounting, but the reality is that the Fed doesn't just do these things arbitrarily. The ultimate purpose of these financial games is to protect the interests of large financial institutions. That's what the fed is doing, and the only way it can be achieved within the context of the current system is by fucking over everyone else.