Thursday, October 30, 2008
Track the amount of money the Fed has loaned to foreign central banks
If you desire, you can track the foreign currency position of the Fed (and these dollar loans to foreign central banks) on a weekly basis by going to the Fed's "Statement of Condition" website below.
http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/Current/
Historical releases are also available there.
When looking at this balance sheet pay attention to the item marked, "Other Federal Reserve assets." You'll notice that it's up to $522.9 billion. That's up $83 billion from the prior week and up $481 billion year over year.
Just so you know, next to the footnote for this entry it says: "Includes assets denominated in foreign currencies and any exchange-translation assets, which are revalued daily at market exchange rates."
Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating!
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Mike,
Ive been looking at the ECB and Fed websites, with respect to these currency swap
lines...
From what I can tell, it looks like the Fed and ECB are transacting these swaps via the FEDs TAF auctions. The TAF dates and the ECB US$ liquidity operations dates line right up and the ECB actually uses the letters "TAF" as a prefix in it's reference numbers. For more details, see the ECBs Oct 13th communique here:
http://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/omo/html/communication.en.html#adhoc118
(Sidenote: If you look at this Oct 13th ECB announcement, it is literally a cut and paste of the FEDs press release of the same date here:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/monetary/20081013a.htm
Talk about "being on the same page", these folks are on it!)
The ECBs last 28-day US$ auction on October 21 for $102B is the day after the last FED TAF 28-day auction on October 20 for $113B, ie it looks like the last TAF was 90% for the benefit of European firms via the ECB.(I didnt see that reported on CNBC!) May say something about how "well" the US financial firms have become since almost all the TAF went abroad?
If the ECB is indeed using the TAF, then maybe the other world central banks will use the TAF for transacting these swaps also. So watching the TAF results may provide more timely info. on these new global swap transactions than
Ive been able to find otherwise.
For the ECB the last 7-day US$ auction went for $92B, the last 28-day went for $102B, there are 84 day US$ auctions scheduled for Nov 3, Dec 1 and Dec 29 at the ECB. (BTW Same dates as FEDs TAF auctions)
At the FED there are four 28 and/or 84 day TAF auctions for up to $150B each scheduled for the next two months, and 2 "forward" TAF auctions scheduled for November for up to $150B each. Six auctions for up to 150 each =$900B
limit.....for now.
ECB Auction link here
http://www.ecb.int/mopo/implement/omo/html/top_history.en.html
FED TAF Schedule here
http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/tafschedule.htm
Resp,
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