Main content
Finance and capital markets
Unit 8: Lesson 2
Quantitative easingUS and Japanese quantitative easing
Comparing quantitative easing in Japan to "credit easing" in the United States. Created by Sal Khan.
Want to join the conversation?
is he saying "log jam" at2:59? if so, what is a log jam?(12 votes)- The log jam is when logs get all twisted and piled up on the river and the don't flow easily down the river. It's a metaphor for cash not flowing because banks won't lend money. They won't lend the money because they have assets, like MBS, that may gone down in value - maybe to 0. Banks keep the cash to replace the lost value of the asset. If the Fed buys the MBS then the bank doesn't need to worry about it anymore and they can then start lending again. That clears the log jam.(49 votes)
Would it not be better to dump these bad banks and instead of buy up their bad loans, bad mortgages etc, put the billions of dollars into capital work programs for the unemployed as well give the low income individual loans to start a business or re-education programs. It seems to me all this lending and printing of money is just going into an already fat bloated oligarchy/elites -1%'rs?(4 votes)- Is it not true that so called "money"-paper printed,with no value behind it- is at the heart of the problem We face now? How then will printing more of it slove the problem?(1 vote)
- Printing money helps temporarily with the problem of inadequate money in circulation (inadequate volume of spending), which is crucial for economic health. It has played a critical role in forestalling economic collapse in the US, which could have been as bad as or worse than the Great Depression (we were well on our way after the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers). But it does nothing to solve the underlying problems causing inadequate monetary circulation in the first place. In the US, the biggest of these structural problems is the immense hoarding of wealth by the top tenth of one percent of the population, to a degree that now equals or exceeds the amount of hoarding at the top that helped to precipitate the Great Depression. Although much of this money may be invested in hedge funds, etc., such investment is a wholly different action from actually spending money to put it into free circulation. When a country's income distribution becomes overly concentrated in the way of an aristocracy (or oligarchy if you prefer), that nation's economic strength suffers greatly, as evidenced by the chart in the attached link. The chart shows that when the GINI index of income distribution is greater than approximately 38, there is a steep drop-off in per capita GDP.
http://visualizingeconomics.com/2006/01/04/gdp-per-capital-vs-gini-index/
As you can see, the US, whose GINI index 30 years ago was in the mid 30's, now has a GINI index of about 45. The US economy now resembles a game of Monopoly that has moved into the phase of domination by one or two. Laws of economics will cause the US economy (GDP per capita) to move sharply downward as long as this structural problem exists, just as the Atlantic City economy in a Monopoly game falls precipitously each time a player goes bankrupt. Mr. Bernanke is fighting those natural deflationary forces by expanding credit (just as US consumers did for decades until they were completely tapped out), but these actions are not sustainable in the long run. The last major oligarchy in the US was broken up by FDR in the thirties, setting the stage for a healthy playing field for capitalism once again. What will happen this time around? Will it be financial collapse from lack of monetary circulation after Mr. Bernanke can no longer suppress interest rates? Or will something or someone come along to break up the oligarchy once again, in time to prevent collapse? The American Dream believes anyone should be able to have as much money as he or she can accumulate, even if it is all the money in the world. But Americans have failed to see that this dream, when carried to its ultimate end for the very few at the top, extinguishes the economy that was initially created by this very dream.(6 votes)
- I don't understand. Where does the Fed get all this money to keep on buying Treasuries? Isn't this just taking from one pocket and putting it into another? Is this approved by Congress? How does the Treasury Dept. fit in?(1 vote)
The Fed is a separate entity from Congress and does not need permission to implement monetary policy. If the Fed needed congressional approval for it's actions, Congress could use monetary policy for political gain, which would be very dangerous.
It might be hard to comprehend, but the Fed literally has an unlimited balance sheet. This is necessary in order to provide stability to the financial system. Knowing that there is a lender of last resort that can literally lend an unlimited amount of money, is a very stabilizing thing to have in a financial system. When the Fed wants to buy a treasury, it creates bank reserves out of thin air. It then goes to a primary dealer bank and takes the bank's treasury in exchange for bank reserves. The amount of assets in the financial system does not change, just the make up of those assets. Treasuries leave and bank reserves enter.
The Treasury department is not involved in this process. The Treasury actions off treasury bonds, which helps fund the federal government.(7 votes)
- What happens if the MBS and other toxic loans that the FED has bought, don't get repaid? What happens if assets on the FED balance sheet become bad debt. Can the FED just print more money to make up the difference?(2 votes)
There wouldn't be any need to print money because of that. The Fed turns its profits over to the US government. If the Fed loses money on some investments, it will turn less profit over to the government. Ultimately the taxpayers will bear the cost if the Fed purchases securities that have to be written off.(4 votes)
- Question about payback of debt accumulated during QE:.
I have heard that the Fed is likely never to sell back the bonds/mortgages that it has bought during QE, but rather just hold them to maturity. The impression that one gets in reading about this is that the problem of a large debt overhang just kind of "goes away" by doing this. I don't understand how holding these bonds/mortgages until maturity does anything other than "push the problem further down the road".
The Fed is currently buying bonds/mortgages at a rate of about $1T per year. Certainly , the maturity dates on the bonds/mortgages bought in any one year do not all mature in the same future year. However, since the maturity dates on the buys that take place each month of each QE year are probably also spread over a range of maturity dates, as a first approximation, one might estimate that in any one year, something like $1T of bonds/mortgages mature and have to be paid off. Doesn't this imply that once these bonds/mortgages start to mature, something like $1T per year will be withdrawn from the economy for several years to pay them off ?
Since the GDP is something g like $16T, this would imply withdrawing something like 6% of the GDP each year for several years. This sounds to me like a prescription for a severe depression.
What am I missing here in my thinking?(2 votes) 
Whoa, I just found that Japan's Debt-to-GDP ratio is over 250% even more than that for Greece! Is this because of what happened with Japan's quantitative easing? Is this a good thing? Bad thing?(2 votes)
After the fed increases the money supply, how long does it actually take for something like the interest rates between commercial banks to go down?(1 vote)- The fed funds rate adjusts almost immediately because the fed has changed the supply/demand balance for those funds.
The issue the Fed faces is that it can manipulate the fed funds rate but that does not necessarily translate into changes in longer term rates, which are the rates that are relevant when it comes to making investment decisions. Banks don't lend money to people overnight, they lend for 3 years or 5 years or 10 or 15 or 30 years.(2 votes)
how much yen is $1 in USA money?(1 vote)- US$ 1 = 78.7711698 Japanese yen. This rate changes regularly .(2 votes)
How does the FED help the credit market when they buy Assets that are in a Logjam like Mortgage Backed Securities.
How does FED help the Mortgage Market or whatever when they buy Mortgage Backed Securities?
How does that ease the credit market?
Thank you!(1 vote)- People who were stuck with illiquid MBS now have cash that they can invest elsewhere.(1 vote)
2:59
Video transcript
When Japan faced its own banking
and debt crisis in the 1990s, the first thing it
did is it started to lower its target
interest rate or the rate that banks borrow
reserves from each other. And the way to do that
is you print money. In the case of Japan, the
central break prints yen. It buys short-term
government securities. But the byproduct of that
is it increases the amount of currency or reserves
in circulation. All banks have more reserves. So the demand for that
reserves will go down or the cost of borrowing
it will go down. And so it lowers
the interest rate. But Japan did that
enough so that it got to a 0% interest rate. But then it really couldn't
lower that interest rate anymore. And that's exactly
what Bernanke is faced with the US credit crisis. So the next thing
that Japan said is OK, we still want more money
to enter into circulation. So we're going to keep
printing more yen. We're going to keep
printing more yen. But since it's
really of no use just to buy the short-term
debt anymore because we've already kind of
priced those as high as we can. We've lowered short-term
interest rates as much as possible. Let's use this stuff
to buy other things. Let's just get this
money into circulation any which way we can. So let's by long-term
Japanese treasuries. Let's buy corporate debt. So they did buy
a bunch of stuff, but their intention
was literally just to increase the
quantity of money. So what the Japanese
did was kind of pure quantitative easing. They were trying to
print money at any cost and let that money
go into circulation in any which way possible. And they would buy a
bunch of stuff to do it. What Bernanke's
doing mechanically is not that different than
what the Japanese did. He started off trying to lower
short-term interest rates so he would buy short-term securities. It would increase the amount
of reserves in circulation, lower the overnight
borrowing rate, lower the federal funds rate. But when that went to 0%, so
they both hit this floor at 0%, Bernanke is like,
well, how do I solve the logjam in the
credit markets? And Bernanke, just
like Japan, says, well, I'm going to start
printing more money and I'm going to
use it to buy assets that the Fed does not
traditionally buy. And Japan did this as well. The difference-- and this
is how a Bernanke explains the difference-- is
he doesn't view this as pure quantitative easing,
not because it's mechanically different, because it really
is mechanically the same thing. But he calls it credit easing. And in his mind, the difference
between quantitative and credit easing is the intent and where
you direct that extra money that you've printed. In Japan's case,
they printed money for the sake of
printing money and they bought all of this stuff
just to get that money into circulation. In Bernanke's case,
he is printing money. He does want their
money in circulation, but that's not the end that
he's trying to achieve. The end is to increase
demand for some of these types of securities
where maybe there's a logjam. So even though mechanically
they're the same, Bernanke says this is
credit easing because I'm trying to fix a problem in
the commercial debt market, or I'm trying to fix the problem
in the mortgage backed security market, while Japan was
just trying to print money for the sake of printing money.