Word: interests
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...decide that it's best to lower rates again, to below 1%, in the coming months as the economy weakens. Even though ultra-low rates may have little immediate economic impact, they help to stabilize the financial sector as well as stock markets. Equities become more attractive when interest earned by stashing cash in the bank is lower than the inflation rate. "While the BOJ's zero-rate policy did not work as expected in terms of reviving the economy, it contributed to preventing the financial system from collapsing," says JPMorgan's Kanno. The U.S. may soon find itself...
...what news was there in today's announcement? Well, nobody dissented, for one thing. The five interest-rate cuts in the first half of this year all came in the face of no votes, as a hawkish minority on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) worried that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke risked setting off an inflationary spiral. Now everyone at the Fed seems to have come around to Bernanke's Great Depression-influenced view that it's a deflationary spiral that we really need to be worried about...
...Federal Reserve announced Wednesday afternoon that it was lowering its target short-term interest rate to 1%. Big deal. Almost everybody was already expecting the half-point rate cut that the Fed delivered, and the actual federal-funds rate (as opposed to the target rate) has mostly been below 1% for the past three weeks anyway. The stock market's reaction? A yawn, as the Dow closed down 74 points...
...bring us into uncharted territory. The federal-funds target rate previously bottomed out at 1% from June 2003 to June 2004. The actual federal-funds rate did drop below 1% a few times in the 1950s, but that was another era - an era when the Fed didn't announce interest-rate targets, banks completely dominated the financial system and the U.S. completely dominated the global economy, and there was no such thing as a money-market fund...
...would struggle to cover their costs and still pay a positive return to investors. The Fed has a new facility in the works, the Money Market Investor Funding Facility, that's intended to ease these pressures. Once that's up and running, don't be surprised if short-term interest rates keep dropping, even to 0% - as was the case in Japan from 1999 to 2006. The Fed would literally be giving money away...