Quote from Ricter:
While Fed policy can be sufficient condition for asset inflation, it is not a necessary condition. In fact, most asset inflation occurs for reasons other than central banking.
Please take a moment to re-read that statement Ricter made. And now, entering a rebuttal, is Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank President Charles Plosser:
Link
Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank President Charles Plosser warned Friday that the Fed will have to be prepared to raise interest rates "aggressively" to prevent an outbreak of inflation once banks start converting excess reserves into actual money as they expand loans in an improving economy.
Plosser, speaking at a seminar sponsored by the National Association for Business Economics, said the Fed has the tools to prevent the $2.4 trillion and growing supply of excess bank reserves from becoming inflationary, but said the question is whether it has "the will" to use those tools.
The Fed "has a lot of work to do" in normalizing monetary policy and faces "numerous challenges and risks," he said at the NABE seminar, part of the annual convention of the Allied Social Science Associations.
Plosser said the "intended effect" of the Fed's low interest rate policies - keeping the federal funds rate near zero for five years and holding down long-term rates through bond buying - was to "distort asset prices." The Fed's avowed intention was to encourage savers to make more risky investments.
But as the Fed raises rates, "it is hard to know how much accumulated distortions have been created in that process," he said. "We don't know what the consequences of the unwinding of those distortions, of resetting prices" will be.
"Are they a long way from where they need to be or just a short way?" Plosser asked.
Another challenging uncertainty facing the Fed, he said, is that it does not know how much it will need to raise the interest rate on excess reserves and/or the repo rate.
For now, banks are content to keep unprecedentedly large amount of excess reserves idle in accounts with the Federal Reserve Banks. So long as that remains the case, those reserves are not inflationary, he said.
But once banks begin to see opportunities to earn more than 25 basis points risk-free at the Fed - the current interest on excess reserves - "money could start flowing out pretty quickly," he warned.
At that point, "we might have to rate rates aggressively," Plosser said, adding that the Fed could then come under increased political pressure to hold rates down.
He also anticipated political complaints as the Fed pays more interest to the banks and makes smaller remittances to the Treasury.
"The market sets rates, and the Fed must move commensurately," he said. "We need to prepare ourselves for that possibility."
If the Fed does not raise rates enough to curb the conversion of excess reserves into money, the Fed could face the problem of "too much inflation, not too little."
Plosser observed that "the Fed is often late in tightening" and in the current environment with large amounts of excess reserves this could be even more dangerous than in the past.
Appearing on the same panel with Plosser, Andrew Haldane, the Bank of England's executive director for financial Stability, emphasized the need for monetary policy to be used in conjunction with macro-prudential supervisory policy to contain credit booms and busts.
For example, he said, bank capital ratios should be increased in good times and lowered in bad.
Currently, Haldane said, very low rates and the related search for yield" is inflating financial risks.
But Plosser was skeptical of macro-prudential regulation, saying central banks' track record for anticipating booms and busts is poor.
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