WORD OF THE DAY – DEBT LIMIT – a note

The Fed creates its own money. It won’t go bankrupt. But every year the Fed sends all the income it made to the Treasury Department.

The Fed made around $5.2 trillion from (REPOs (overnight loans to banks, credit unions, money makers, etc.) in 2022. At the end of 2022, the Fed had a net income of $58.4 billion.

The Fed’s problem is that interest rates on the REPOs (bank overnight loans) that the Fed charges now have begun to exceed the Fed’s interest rates on those securities (stocks & bonds, etc.) that it bought way back when Fed REPO interest rates were much lower than today.

Also lagging, because the Fed is using (QT) “Quantitative tightening” i.e. selling off its assets for income which it has to pay to the Treasury each year, this way of QT selling off of securities can take a long time to amass the income the Fed needs for paying off our Treasury Department spending on past U.S. debts.

At the end of year 2022 the Fed sent the Treasury Department $76 billion. However, interest expenses of the Fed exploded a factor of 19 to $102.4 billion in 2022, up from $5.7 billion in 2021.

So, the issue is that right now in 2023 the the Fed is losing income and running into the red, and the Treasury is not allowed to print money.

Once the debt limit is exceeded, our government will lose all trust in faith in it. And there will be little consensus possible to discuss future plans for spending. That’s just a waste of time. Ask anyone who has wound up dealing with a high interest rate money lender!

The Fed maybe could make a RRP promise ( reverse repurchase agreement) with (banks and money market-makers) offering to buy back its securities at a higher price in the future, but this seems to me to be “going from the pot into the fire or as they say “Kicks the can down the road”. And dangerous! As buybacks have just put the store, Bed, Bath and Beyond out of business.

I’m really sorry to say this, but the image I have in my head today is the serpent swallowing and eating its tail and insides. I sure hope I’m wrong!

And I hope everyone of you has been saving during our Covid era for a better economy, because I still believe that could be the case of what our bipartisan Congress has done for us in the past two years.

Source: Wolf Street Despite Losses since September, the Fed Still Made a Profit for the Whole Year 2022, Remitted $76 billion to US Treasury Dept.