曼昆经济学原理(宏观经济分册)5.ppt

* * * * * * * * * Reserve requirements were introduced defined on the slide titled “Bank Reserves,” immediately following “The Structure of the Fed.” Reserve requirements are not a good tool for monetary policy: To make the money supply grow over time, the Fed would have to continually reduce reserve requirements. This is neither possible – they cannot be reduced below 0 – nor desirable – if reserves are too low, then banks will have liquidity problems, and bank runs (discussed later in the chapter) might become fashionable again. To reduce the money supply using reserve requirements, banks wouldn’t be able to make as many loans, which would make the banking industry less profitable and could cause it to contract. * Why might banks run low on reserves? On any given day, it might turn out that depositors make higher-than-expected withdrawals, or the bank makes more loans than expected. * The prime rate (the rate banks charge on loans to their best customers) and the 3-month Treasury Bill rate are very highly correlated with the Fed Funds rate. The mortgage rate shown is the 30-year fixed rate. It is less correlated with the Federal Funds rate, but this is to be expected: Fed Funds are overnight loans between banks, while mortgages are 30-year loans to consumers. source: FRED database /fred2/ * This graph is not in the textbook, so it is not supported with material in the study guide or test bank. Therefore, you may wish to omit this slide from your presentation. But I hope you will consider keeping it. It is uses a simple supply-demand diagram to illustrate something described verbally in the text: how the Federal Reserve targets the federal funds rate. The demand for federal funds comes from banks that find themselves with insufficient reserves, perhaps because they made too many loans or had higher-than-expected withdrawals. The supply of federal funds comes from banks that find themselves with more reserves than they want, perhaps