On Sunday, March 12th, the Federal Reserve
suddenly announced:
To support American businesses and households, the Federal Reserve Board on Sunday announced it will make available additional funding to eligible depository institutions to help assure banks have the ability to meet the needs of all their depositors … The additional funding will be made available through the creation of a new Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP), offering loans of up to one year in length
And now for the juicy part. The loans will be offered to
eligible depository institutions pledging U.S. Treasuries, agency debt and mortgage-backed securities, and other qualifying assets as collateral.
In plain English:
1. The Federal Reserve is going to lend money to American banks; and
2. The banks will guarantee the loans with holdings of U.S. government debt.
Officially, the Bank Term Funding Program is supposed to be a liquidity lifeline for banks, so that they do not have to sell their U.S. government debt at a loss in case they end up in liquidity trouble.
In reality, it is a thinly veiled way for the Federal Reserve to get back into the business of buying U.S. government debt.
The BTFP is a copy of the Term Refinancing Operations programs that the European Central Bank
introduced in 2008. The aim of the TROs was to provide funds for European banks that purchased euro zone government debt.
In both cases, it works as follows. The central bank offers a commercial bank a loan worth, say, $1 billion. There are two conditions: the bank must hold government debt securities as collateral, and they must pay back the loan a year later. The bank either designates $1 billion of sovereign debt in its asset portfolio as security for the loan, or—and this is important—it buys $1 billion worth of government debt in the open market.
This is a profitable endeavor for the bank, which gets interest-rate payments on the debt securities it owns. At 4%, that means $40 million on a $1 billion portfolio. When the central-bank loan expires a year later, the bank is incentivized to hand over its government debt securities to its creditor. The reason is simple: the central bank values the collateral at par value—the best way to secure beforehand the asset transfer at the end of the loan.
Under the new BTFP program, the Federal Reserve is creating irresistible incentives for commercial banks to expand their holdings of U.S. debt. Since they are the ones buying the debt, officially it does not look like the Federal Reserve is simply printing money to monetize the U.S. government’s unending budget deficits. Yet just like with the ECB’s Term Refinancing Operations 14 years ago, that is exactly what the BTFP is going to do.
The collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank is proof that government, no matter how much it tries, can never prevent executives at a bank from running it into the ground. The reaction from the Federal Reserve is proof that government, in all its forms, is always, regardless of experience, willing to use a crisis to introduce new policies with unintended, yet potentially very bad, consequences.