Central Banks to Inject Liquidity

The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip has a good breakdown of what the central banks announced:

The Federal Reserve has joined with four other major central banks to announce a series of measures designed to inject added cash into global money markets in hopes of thawing a credit freeze that threatens their economies.

The Fed said today it would create a new "term auction facility" under which it would lend at least $40 billion and potentially far more, in four separate auctions starting this week. The loans would be at rates far below the rate charged on direct loans from the Fed to banks from its so-called "discount window."

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"This is not about particular financial institutions with particular problems. It is about market functioning," said a senior Federal Reserve official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the actions.

The Financial Times’ Martin Wolf adds some colour:

The central bank helicopters are planning a co-ordinated drop of liquidity on troubled market waters. The money to be dropped now is not that large. But if this does not work, more will surely follow. The helicopters will fly again and again and again.

One point is clear: central banks must be pretty worried to take such a joint action.

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It is easy to understand why central banks should have decided to take heroic action. Confidence has fled the markets in a four-month long episode of “revulsion”. As a result, monetary policy is not being transmitted to the ultimate borrowers as central banks wish. Particularly worrying has been the widening of gaps between three-month inter-bank lending rates and policy rates in the dollar, euro and sterling markets. Spreads in the last of these have recently become enormous (at more than 100 basis points).

Yet this is not the only indication of distress: in the US, for example, the spread between the rate of interest on 3-month treasury bills and AA-rated asset-backed commercial paper has widened to 270 basis points from a mere 30 basis points earlier in the year. This is revulsion, indeed.

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