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Can Tightening Fight the Collateral Shortage?

Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge claims that any taper in QE will be a response to the collateral shortage — the fact that quantitative easing has stripped an important part of the market’s collateral base for rehypothecation out of the market. With less collateral in the market, there is less of a base for credit creation. The implication here is that quantitative easing is tightening rather than easing credit conditions. The evidence? Breakdown in the Treasuries market resulting in soaring fails-to-deliver and fails-to-receive:

20130621_fails_0

Tyler notes:

Simply put, the main reason the Fed is tapering has nothing to do with the economy and everything to do with the TBAC presentation (rehypothecation and collateral shortages) and that the US is now running smaller deficits!!!

I don’t disagree with this. The ultra-low rate environment (that is still an ultra-low rate environment in spite of the small spike in Treasuries since murmurs of the taper began) on everything from Treasuries to junk bonds is symptomatic of a collateral shortage. Quantitative easing may ease the base money supply (as an anti-deflationary response to the ongoing deflation of the shadow money supply since 2008), but it tightens the supply of collateral.

The evidence on this is clear — expanding government deficits post-2008 did not bridge the gap in securities issuance that the financial crisis and central bank interventions created:

assets

The obvious point, at least to me, is that it seems easier and certainly less Rube Goldberg-esque to fight the collateral shortage by running bigger Federal deficits until private market securities issuance can take its place. Unfortunately quantitative easing itself is something of a Rube Goldberg machine with an extremely convoluted transmission mechanism, and fiscal policy is not part of the Fed’s mandate.

But I am not sure that tightening can fight the collateral shortage at all. The money supply is still shrunken from the pre-crisis peak (much less the pre-crisis trend) even after all the quantitative easing. Yes, many have talked of the Federal Reserve inflating the money supply, but the broadest measures of the money supply are smaller than they were before the quantitative easing even started. This deflation is starting to show up in price trends, with core PCE falling below 1% — its lowest level in history. Simply, without the meagre inflation of the money supply that quantitative easing is providing, steep deflation seems highly likely. I don’t think the Fed can stop.

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Why QE Didn’t Cause Hyperinflation

Ben Bernanke, and the Keynesians were right: Quantitative Easing has not caused the kind of inflation that the non-mainstream Austrian economists claimed that it would. The theory was that a soaring monetary base, and the zero-interest-rate-policy would lead to easy money flowing like a tsunami, and creating such a gush that inflation on goods and services — the change in cost from month-to-month and year-to-year — would soar, making daily life impossible for those on fixed incomes, and in a worst-case-scenario — like Zimbabwe, or Weimar Germany — forcing consumers to use an armful or wheelbarrow of cash to purchase a loaf of bread. Let’s look at the monetary base:


That is a huge spike!The monetary base — also known as M0 — is the total amount of coins, paper and bank deposits in the economy. Quantitative easing injects new money into the monetary base, and as we can see above, has great increased it. So why can I still buy bread without a wheelbarrow? That is because the monetary base and the money supply are two different things. In a fractional-reserve banking system, deposits in banks can be lent, re-deposited, and lent again. Government policy determines the number of times that money can be lent — in the United States, total credit cannot exceed lending by more than ten times. The money supply — which accounts for fractional reserve lending — is known as M2. Let’s look at it:


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