Federal Reserve sedang terlibat dalam transformasi kolosal ekonomi keuangan. Namun, hampir tidak ada yang memperhatikan hal ini.
Apa yang dilakukan mirip dengan menggerakkan kawanan gajah melalui Midtown Manhattan tanpa menarik banyak perhatian. Dahulu hal itu terjadi di New York pada dini hari – ketika sirkus datang ke kota dan gajah berjalan melintasi jembatan dan terowongan kota menuju Madison Square Garden.
Saya tidak sedang membicarakan keputusan Federal Reserve tentang tingkat suku bunga jangka pendek, yang menjadi headline ketika bank sentral bertemu, seperti yang terjadi pada hari Rabu. Federal Reserve mempertahankan tingkat suku bunga stabil – dan cukup tinggi – sekitar 5,33 persen, dalam upaya frustrasi untuk meredam inflasi.
Saya sedang membicarakan tentang proyek Federal Reserve yang sangat ambisius dan kurang dipahami yang dikenal sebagai perampingan kuantitatif – Q.T. yang merupakan kependekan dari quantitative tightening. Hal ini merujuk pada pengurangan obligasi Treasury dan sekuritas yang didukung hipotek di lembaran neraca federal yang mammoth tersebut.
Bank sentral mengatakan pada hari Rabu bahwa mereka akan mulai melambatkan laju pemangkasan aset ini pada bulan Juni, menjadi $60 miliar per bulan dari pengurangan maksimum sebesar $95 miliar per bulan. Mereka tidak sedang menjual sekuritas, tetapi diam-diam mengeliminasi beberapa ketika jatuh tempo, tanpa menginvestasikan kembali hasilnya.
Angka-angka ini mungkin terlihat besar. Namun, pada dasarnya mereka kecil.
Pertimbangkan bahwa aset bank sentral mencapai puncak dua tahun yang lalu hampir mencapai $9 triliun. Jumlah tersebut hampir sepertiga dari semua barang dan jasa – Produk Domestik Bruto – yang diproduksi di Amerika Serikat dalam satu tahun. Sekarang, setelah usaha yang sangat hati-hati, Federal Reserve telah mengurangi total itu menjadi sekitar $7,4 triliun.
Ya, mereka telah menghapus sekitar $1,6 triliun dari neracanya. Namun, bahkan setelah dua tahun melakukan perampingan kuantitatif, jumlah obligasi dan sekuritas yang masih dimiliki Federal Reserve adal…
Ini merupakan perihal yang membingungkan, namun pemahaman dasar tentang perampingan kuantitatif penting untuk beberapa alasan:
Kebijakan ini sedang mempengaruhi pasar keuangan sekarang dan membuat kondisi hidup menjadi lebih sulit bagi jutaan orang – menempatkan tekanan pada pasar Treasury dan hipotek serta sejumlah suku bunga yang terkait, efektif menambah ketegangan moneter yang Federal Reserve terapkan dengan menaikkan suku bunga federal jangka pendek.
Perampingan kuantitatif merupakan operasi berbahaya. Upaya sebelumnya – terutama, pada 2019 – mengganggu pasar keuangan. Hal tersebut bisa terjadi lagi jika Federal Reserve terlalu tergesa-gesa.
Jika Federal Reserve bertindak dengan kecepatan yang lambat seperti yang dijanjikan rencana saat ini, mereka akan memiliki triliunan sekuritas selama bertahun-tahun ke depan. Eksperimen yang dimulai pada krisis keuangan tahun 2008 ini menjadi permanen, memberikan Federal Reserve – dan siapa pun yang mengendalikannya – kekuasaan yang sangat besar.
Rendahnya laju perampingan kuantitatif sebagian bertanggung jawab atas ketidakmampuan Federal Reserve untuk memberikan kontribusi pada anggaran nasional.
Hal ini karena Federal Reserve juga telah menaikkan tingkat suku bunga, yang bergerak ke arah berlawanan dengan harga obligasi. Dengan kebijakan sendiri, Federal Reserve telah mengurangi nilai aset yang mereka miliki. Dan sejauh ini mereka telah memberikan…
Berbeda dengan Silicon Valley Bank, yang menjadi tidak mampu tahun lalu, Federal Reserve bisa bertahan dengan kerugian kertas – namun mereka tidak dapat membantu pemerintah Amerika Serikat mengurangi defisit yang menggemparkan.
Kuantitas Easing
Kuantitatif tightening is a reverse of an approach to monetary policy known as quantitative easing, adopted by the Fed when Ben S. Bernanke was chair. After the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the economy and the markets crashed. Trying urgently to give the economy a stimulative jolt, the Fed lowered interest rates to nearly zero, but that wasn’t enough.
Those were desperate times, and the Fed improvised. Expanding on a program that the Bank of Japan started in 2001, the…
The idea, as Mr. Bernanke said in his book “21st Century Monetary Policy,” was “to influence private-sector decisions, which don’t usually depend directly on Treasury yields.” The Fed, he added, “expected that lower yields in the Treasury market would result in lower yields elsewhere — for example, on residential and commercial mortgages and corporate bonds.”
In addition, Fed policymakers expected that “lower long-term, private-sector interest rates should stimulate business investment and consumer spending on new cars and houses,” Mr. Bernanke said. “Lower long-term interest rates would also increase the prices of other financial assets, such as stocks, and weaken the dollar, easing financial conditions more broadly.”
All of those things happened.
But what started as a temporary expedient evolved into a regular part of the Fed’s toolbox, one that the Fed has used too frequently, some economists say.
“The analogy is a terrible one, but what the Fed has done is engender an addiction,” Raghuram Rajan, a finance professor at the University of Chicago, said in an interview.
Mr. Rajan, who is a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, said that U.S. banks had become “addicted to the easy liquidity” associated with the Fed’s expansionary policies, and that weaning them off this flood of money had proved excruciatingly difficult.
It’s revealing to look back at early official Fed commentary. In February 2010, in a statement before the House Committee on Financial Services, Mr. Bernanke said, “The Federal Reserve anticipates that it will eventually return to an operating framework with much lower reserve balances than at present.” His statement was labeled “Federal Reserve’s exit strategy.”
But the Fed never exited its quantitative easing strategy. In fact, Fed records show that when Mr. Bernanke testified in 2010 about an eventual end to quantitative easing, the central bank’s balance sheet contained less than $2.3 trillion in assets. Fourteen years…
Why Tightening Is Tough
Crises happened, the economy faltered and the Fed engaged in multiple rounds of quantitative easing under Mr. Bernanke and his successors, Janet L. Yellen and Jerome H. Powell, the current Fed chair.
All tried quantitative tightening — which, in early Fed planning, appeared to mean a reversal of the Fed’s active intervention in the bond and mortgage markets, a radical reduction in its holdings and a return to pre-crisis operations. In his 2010 testimony, for example, Mr. Bernanke said the Fed could eventually sell the assets it purchased.
But all these years later, it has not done so. When it is not in emergency-response mode and is trying to return to something resembling “normal,” it has allowed maturing bonds and other securities to slowly “run off” or “roll off,” instead of reinvesting…
It’s moving at an excruciating pace. A report in April by a group within the New York Federal Reserve Bank projected that even with continued quantitative tightening, the assets on the overall Fed balance sheet will fall no lower than $6 trillion in the next few years — and then begin rising again.
In the past, when the Fed even hinted that it might swiftly shed assets, financial markets buckled. In a news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Powell alluded to the 2019 quantitative tightening effort that led to chaos in the money markets — and an about-face by the central bank. The Fed is now slowing the already stately pace of balance sheet roll-off precisely “so that it doesn’t lead to financial turmoil as it did the last time,” he said.
Simply put, the Fed’s balance sheet has assets on one side and liabilities on the other — and they must balance. When it buys assets, it creates bank reserves out of thin air, and it has been paying banks to keep those reserves deposited at the Fed. The reserves are available for emergencies as well as for routine operations. In periods of quantitative tightening, like this one, both the assets and the reserves shrink — and that has periodically caused major dislocations.
So far in this round, the Fed has been managing the process deftly. Scarcely anyone has noticed it drain more than a trillion dollars from the financial system. Yet by concentrating so much financial firepower in its own hands, the Fed may be assuring that the potential for major flare-ups, and even worse, will always loom.