The head of the Federal Reserve region that includes Oklahoma thinks the Fed may be overreaching in its latest round of bond-buying aimed at boosting the economy and bringing down unemployment.
“I was not in favor of doing more. We have done a lot,” said Esther L. George, president of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. George spoke Tuesday at the bank's Oklahoma City branch. She participates in the Fed's monetary policy-making board meetings, and in January will become a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee.
The committee last week voted to begin a third round of buying bonds — $40 billion a month — in an effort to boost a sluggish recovery and drive down a stubbornly high unemployment rate. The Fed has kept interest rates near zero and pledged to keep them there for perhaps another two years and has spent more than $2 trillion in two earlier bond-buying ventures known as quantitative easing.
“We've kept interest rates at zero. You can't be more accommodative, I think, in many respects. We've tripled our balance sheet,” George said. “When I look at the economy and think what is it that's holding back demand, what is it that is causing the unemployment rate to stay high, it does not seem like these are factors conducive to more easing.”
She worries the possible risks of further stimulation, including market distortions, misplaced incentives and inflation, outweigh the potential benefits.
“If I thought we had tight policy or somehow credit conditions were tight, then you would weigh that differently,” she said. “You'd say to get credit flowing, cheaper money might be better. In today's setting, I can't see that that's the issue. So adding to it feels to me like compounding the risk.”
Keeping rates low is making it difficult for investors to get low-risk returns, particularly among older consumers who need to generate income, George said. Banks, insurance companies and pension funds also will be more likely to turn to riskier investments to generate needed returns, she said.
The Fed, with its vast and growing portfolio, is vulnerable to losses when interest rates begin to rise, she said. And the Fed's big buys of mortgage-backed securities create fundamental changes in the marketplace, she said.
“I worry about the distortions that it creates in markets,” she said. “Anytime you have the government this involved, you have to think something is not happening right. Right now, at zero interest rate, the markets really aren't pricing risk. They're not really functioning the way they normally would.”
Her biggest long-term concern with the Fed's activities is the potential for igniting inflation.
“I do worry down the road, will we be able to pull back the liquidity before inflation takes off?” George said. “If you look at the times we start pulling rates up, you want to make sure the recovery is on firm footing before you do it. And at times, when we've had to tackle inflation is when we've waited too long to pull back.”
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