The Future Path of the Monetary Base and Why It Matters

Now that the shrinking of the Fed's balance sheet has been announced, I thought it worth nothing what it means for the future path of the monetary base. Drawing upon the Fed's median forecast of its assets through 2025 that comes from the 2016 SOMA Annual Report, I was able to create the figures below. 

The figures show the trend growth path of currency and a series I call the 'permanent monetary base' extrapolated to 2025. The latter series is the monetary base minus excess reserves. This measure has been used by Tatom (2014) and Belongia and Ireland (2017) as a more reliable indicator of the monetary base that actually matters for monetary conditions. These two measures, which reflect the liability side of the Fed's balance sheet, are plotted along side the projected path of the asset side of the Fed's balance sheet. The first figure below shows this exercise in terms of dollars and the latter one is in log-levels.

What is interesting is that the Fed's median forecast of its assets eventually converges with the trend growth of currency which historically has made up most of the monetary base. Unsurprisingly, the permanent measure of the monetary base also tracks currency's trend path. Jim Hamilton does something similar here.  

So what are the takeaways? First, the Fed is expecting to confirm the temporary nature of the monetary expansion  under the QE programs. That is, the only major growth in the monetary base the Fed expects to persist is that coming from the normal currency demand growth that follows the growth of the economy. This endogenous money growth would have happened in the absence of QE. 

Second, the temporary nature of the QE programs, implied by these figures, is a key reason why these programs did not spur a robust recovery. For reasons laid out in this blog post and in this forthcoming article, there needed to be some exogenous permanent increase in the monetary base to spur robust aggregate demand growth. It never happened and neither did the much-needed recovery.  Instead we got the monetary regime change we never asked for.





Update I: See George Selgin's take on why QE was not very effective.

Update II: Brian Bonis, Jane Ihrig, and Min Wei from the Board of Governors just posted a note with the latest forecast of the Fed's balance sheet. It is updated to include the latest information from the recent FOMC meetings. My figures come from an earlier forecast and are a bit dated relative to these numbers. Their forecasted end value for the SOMA holdings ranges from $2.6 to $3.2 trillion. The median forecast I used above ends up at $3.2 trillion. So my trends would fit their high end estimates. 

However, their note is more nuanced than my graphs above. While they recognize that currency demand growth will be a big determinant of the future size of the Fed's balance sheet, they also recognize that depending on what the Fed does and what happens to banking regulation there could be an additional buffer in the Fed's balance sheet from excess reserves. Here is an extract:
Normalization of the size of the balance sheet occurs when the securities portfolio reverts to the level consistent with its longer-run trend. This trend is determined largely by the level of currency in circulation and a projected longer-run level of reserve balances. There is a great deal of uncertainty about the longer-run level of reserves, which could be affected by factors such as structural changes in the banking system, the effects of regulation on banks' demand for reserves, and the Committee's ultimate choice of a long-run operating framework. We show two scenarios. We assume that the longer-run level of reserve balances is either $100 billion (as in our April 2017 projection) or $613 billion (the median response from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's June 2017 Survey of Primary Dealers and Survey of Market Participants)
Here are the relevant charts from their note:



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