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Title: Ron Paul’s Surprisingly Lucid Solution to the Debt Ceiling Impasse
Source:
The New Republic
URL Source: http://www.tnr.com/article/politics ... l-debt-ceiling-federal-reserve
Published: Jul 5, 2011
Author: Dean Baker
Post Date: 2011-07-05 21:15:10 by jwpegler
Keywords: None
Views: 2283
Comments: 2
Representative Ron Paul has hit upon a remarkably creative way to deal with the impasse over the debt ceiling: have the Federal Reserve Board destroy the $1.6 trillion in government bonds it now holds. While at first blush this idea may seem crazy, on more careful thought it is actually a very reasonable way to deal with the crisis. Furthermore, it provides a way to have lasting savings to the budget. The basic story is that the Fed has bought roughly $1.6 trillion in government bonds through its various quantitative easing programs over the last two and a half years. This money is part of the $14.3 trillion debt that is subject to the debt ceiling. However, the Fed is an agency of the government. Its assets are in fact assets of the government. Each year, the Fed refunds the interest earned on its assets in excess of the money needed to cover its operating expenses. Last year the Fed refunded almost $80 billion to the Treasury. In this sense, the bonds held by the Fed are literally money that the government owes to itself. Unlike the debt held by Social Security, the debt held by the Fed is not tied to any specific obligations. The bonds held by the Fed are assets of the Fed. It has no obligations that it must use these assets to meet. There is no one who loses their retirement income if the Fed doesn’t have its bonds. In fact, there is no direct loss of income to anyone associated with the Fed’s destruction of its bonds. This means that if Congress told the Fed to burn the bonds, it would in effect just be destroying a liability that the government had to itself, but it would still reduce the debt subject to the debt ceiling by $1.6 trillion. This would buy the country considerable breathing room before the debt ceiling had to be raised again. President Obama and the Republican congressional leadership could have close to two years to talk about potential spending cuts or tax increases. Maybe they could even talk a little about jobs. In addition, there’s a second reason why Representative Paul’s plan is such a good idea. As it stands now, the Fed plans to sell off its bond holdings over the next few years. This means that the interest paid on these bonds would go to banks, corporations, pension funds, and individual investors who purchase them from the Fed. In this case, the interest payments would be a burden to the Treasury since the Fed would no longer be collecting (and refunding) the interest. To be sure, there would be consequences to the Fed destroying these bonds. The Fed had planned to sell off the bonds to absorb reserves that it had pumped into the banking system when it originally purchased the bonds. These reserves can be created by the Fed when it has need to do so, as was the case with the quantitative easing policy. Creating reserves is in effect a way of “printing money.” During a period of high unemployment, this can boost the economy with little fear of inflation, since there are many unemployed workers and excess capacity to keep downward pressure on wages and prices. However, at some point the economy will presumably recover and inflation will be a risk. This is why the Fed intends to sell off its bonds in future years. Doing so would reduce the reserves of the banking system, thereby limiting lending and preventing inflation. If the Fed doesn’t have the bonds, however, then it can’t sell them off to soak up reserves. But as it turns out, there are other mechanisms for restricting lending, most obviously raising the reserve requirements for banks. If banks are forced to keep a larger share of their deposits on reserve (rather than lend them out), it has the same effect as reducing the amount of reserves. To take a simple arithmetic example, if the reserve requirement is 10 percent and banks have $1 trillion in reserves, the system will support the same amount of lending as when the reserve requirement is 20 percent and the banks have $2 trillion in reserves. In principle, the Fed can reach any target for lending limits by raising reserve requirements rather than reducing reserves. As a practical matter, the Fed has rarely used changes in the reserve requirement as an instrument for adjusting the amount of lending in the system. Its main tool has been changing the amount of reserves in the system. However, these are not ordinary times. The Fed does not typically buy mortgage backed securities or long-term government bonds either. It has been doing both over the last two years precisely because this downturn is so extraordinary. And in extraordinary times, it is appropriate to take extraordinary measures—like the Fed destroying its $1.6 trillion in government bonds and using increases in reserve requirements to limit lending and prevent inflation. In short, Representative Paul has produced a very creative plan that has two enormously helpful outcomes. The first one is that the destruction of the Fed’s $1.6 trillion in bond holdings immediately gives us plenty of borrowing capacity under the current debt ceiling. The second benefit is that it will substantially reduce the government’s interest burden over the coming decades. This is a proposal that deserves serious consideration, even from people who may not like its source.
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#1. To: All (#0)
As I've been saying, we can also do this with the debt in the Social Security "trust fund". There is no "trust fund". The debt that resulted from borrowing from the Social Security account to use in the general fund is just another book keeping fiction. Tear up the T-bills that the Federal Reserve and Social Security system are holding and the national debt drops from $14.5 billion to just over $10 billion.
[...snip] Paul’s gambit is also a clever way to hoist the banks on their own petard. The deficit hysteria has in no small measure been driven by the banks as part of a desire to enforce their new program of insulating bondholders from losses, including those of inflation. State support for policies like that amounts to socialism for rentiers, since the reason bonds pay more interest that Treasury bills is interest rate risk and credit risk. If investors want a premium yield, they should expect to bear the hazards which go with them. I hope Paul prevails. When a Congressman who has often been depicted as a wingnut has the best idea in the room, you know a serious house cleaning is in order. Obama's watch stopped on 24 May 2008, but he's been too busy smoking crack to notice.
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."-- Charles Duell, Commissioner of US Patent Office, 1899
#2. To: jwpegler (#0)
The Baker discussion says Congress would have to approve this maneuver, and that would seem to put everything back at square zero. But perhaps not. I’m not terribly conversant with the fault lines within the Republican camp, but Ron Paul has a great deal of appeal with voters. The fact that he’s willing to put out a clean, viable third option may suggest that he is not alone in recognizing that his fellow party members are playing Russia roulette with all chambers loaded. And as one of the Fed’s longest-standing critics, for him to say, effectively, that some of the Federal debt has effectively been monetized, why not quit pretending otherwise, is close to a Nixon comes to China moment. 
"We (government) need to do a lot less, a lot sooner" ~Ron Paul
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