In my last post I wrote about the lawsuit TNB USA Inc has filed against the New York Fed, which has refused to grant the would-be bank a Master Account. I argued that, despite its name (TNB stands for “The Narrow Bank”), and despite what some commentators (now including, alas, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial staff) seem to think, TNB isn’t meant to supply ordinary persons with a safer alternative to deposits at ordinary banks. Instead, TNB’s purpose is to receive deposits from non-bank financial institutions only, to allow them to take advantage, indirectly, of the Fed’s policy of paying interest on bank reserves — thereby potentially earning more than they might either by investing directly in securities or by taking advantage of the Fed’s reverse repo program, which is open to them but which presently offers a rate 20 basis points lower than the Fed’s IOER rate.
A Hollow Victory?
Yet for all the controversy TNB’s lawsuit has generated, its outcome may no longer matter as much as it might once have. For one thing, TNB’s success can no longer undermine the Fed’s ON-RRP program, which is designed to implement the Fed’s target interest rate lower bound, for the simple reason that that program is already moribund. Commenting on my post, J.P. Koning observed that, while the Fed’s ON-RRP facility, first established in December 2013, once supplied non-bank financial institutions with an attractive investment alternative, it ceased being so this year. As the chart below, reproduced from J.P.‘s comment, shows, the facility — which once accommodated hundreds of billions of dollars in bids — is now completely inactive:
The decline on ON-RRP activity since the beginning of this year is a byproduct of the general increase in market rates of interest, both absolutely and relative to the Fed’s ON-RRP offer rate, that has made the program both less attractive to potential participants and unnecessary as a means for establishing a lower-bound for the effective fed funds rate. But that decline is but one symptom of a more general development, to wit: the tendency of the Fed’s policy rate settings to lag further and further behind increases in market-determined interest rates, thanks in no small part to the Trump administration’s fiscal profligacy. Here, for example, is a FRED chart comparing the Fed’s policy rate settings to the yield on 1‑month Treasury bills:
In the figure the “Lower Limit” of the Fed’s federal funds target range is also the Fed’s ON-RRP facility offer rate, while the “Upper Limit” is the same as the Fed’s IOER rate until mid-June 2018, and 5 basis points above the IOER rate afterwards.
Although an overnight repurchase agreement is a more liquid investment than a one-month Treasury bill, its easy to appreciate how that difference ceased, in the last year or so, to compensate for the gap between the ON-RRP rate and other money market rates. But those rates have also increased relative to the IOER rate, with the Fed’s June decision to reduce the IOER – ON-RRP rate spread from 25 to 20 basis points, reducing the attractiveness of IOER relative to money market rates by another 5 bps. Consequently, bank reserves are also much less attractive relative to money market instruments, and especially to shorter-term Treasury bills, than they were a year ago.
All of which means that TNB’s efforts could end up being in vain even if the Fed ends up granting it an account. As J.P. Koning points out in his own post concerning the TNB case, “even if TNB succeeds in its lawsuit, there is a larger threat. The gap the bank is trying to exploit is shrinking.” In contrast, when the TNB plan was originally developed in 2016, that gap was about 25 basis points.