Frances Coppola — Floors and ceilings

No, this isn't a post about derivatives. It's about the relationship between reserves and safe assets. I think it is time I brought the two together and created a unified explanation of the behaviour of safe assets in the presence of excess reserves which earn a positive rate of interest....

It is not sensible to ignore non-banks in the conduct of monetary policy, especially in a financial system as disintermediated as that in the US. Both money and government debt are needed by the financial system: the balance between the two is currently distorted and this is having untoward effects, especially on the shadow banking system whose lifeblood is the collateral that is becoming scarce. A large part of the problem is the assumption that money is solely the responsibility of the central bank, and debt is about government financing. As I've said before, for a sovereign currency-issuing government neither of these is true.  Monetary and fiscal policy are both ways of managing money: they affect the economy in different ways because of the different institutions through which they work. And short-term government debt and currency are both "money" as far as financial markets are concerned.

The central bank is the lender of last resort - or perhaps more accurately, as Perry Mehrling suggests, the DEALER of last resort - for banks. And because non-banks don't have central bank support but can use government debt as a risk-free asset, effectively the Treasury is the lender or dealer of last resort for non-banks. Banks and non-banks together make up the financial system. Therefore we can regard fiscal policy as monetary policy applied to non-banks, and monetary policy as fiscal policy applied to banks. Interest rates are monetary taxes: taxes are fiscal interest rates. They do the same job on opposite sides of the bank/non-bank divide, i.e. controlling the total amount of "money" (in its broadest sense) in circulation. And there is of course a considerable overlap, since in reality the divide between banks and non-banks is entirely artificial: interest rate policy affects non-banks and taxation affects banks. Central banks and governments therefore are partners in the management of the financial system as a whole. 

Coppola Comment
Floors and ceilings
Frances Coppola
(h/t Andy Baltchford via email)