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Speaker: The Federal Reserve is set to pay $1,100,000,000,000 to major banks, effectively paying them interest on the money that's already in their vaults. A new bill would end it. Last week, Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz introduced a bill to end the Fed's so called interest on reserves program, where the Fed pays interest on the dollars banks are required to deposit with the Fed. So what happens is the Fed prints money to finance federal deficits and artificially boost the economy, both of which generate fat profits on Wall Street. It does this by pushing interest rates below market and with something called quantitative easing where it literally makes up imaginary money, uses it to buy stuff, putting the money into circulation.
But the Fed knows that all that money creation also creates inflation. So it turns around and pays those same banks to park some of the new money at the Fed. So it's a giant self licking ice cream cone that siphons nearly $200,000,000,000 a year from everybody who holds dollars. Now up till the two thousand eight crisis, banks did not earn any interest on their reserves. After all, reserves are supposed to be like money in the vault backing deposits.
Bankers already had the exorbitant privilege of only needing to keep 10¢ on the dollar in the vault as reserves, with the Fed and Treasury standing ready to bail out the other 90¢ at taxpayer cost. But all that changed in 2008 when banks proved so reckless that they threatened to topple our entire financial system, at which point they were punished by getting interest on their reserves. The scam exploded during COVID. So in 2019, banks were parking about $2,000,000,000,000 at the Fed paying just 0.1% interest. So the Fed was paying banks $2,000,000,000 a year.
Five years later, that has grown to 3 and a half trillion paying four and a half percent interest. So that's $187,000,000,000 per year. In fact, these interest payments now make up most of the profits of the entire American banking system. 187,000,000,000 interest versus 270,000,000,000 of bank profits. So 70¢ on the banker dollar siphoned directly out of your life savings with a fat slab going to foreign banks.
It is a big club and you ain't in it. Now the Fed claims it needs to pay interest in order to soak up all the dollars the Fed printed. Of course, they don't phrase it that way. Remember, the Fed pretends money printing has nothing to do with inflation. In their world, inflation falls out of the sky caused by greedy workers, greedy supply chains, animal spirits, boats stuck in the Suez, with the Fed heroically jumping in to pay bankers strip club tabs to keep the republic from collapsing.
As James Grant put it, the arsonist pretending to be firemen. Sussex brought to you by onchain.com. Ted Cruz's bill probably won't pass since bankers know how campaign donations work. But what if congress stopped paying bankers strip club tabs? In short, roughly a trillion dollars would flow out of reserves and into lending to business and customers.
This would lower the interest rate on loans, mortgages, even government debt, and a good chunk would go to creating job. Now I could nudge inflation since the frozen reserves were hiding part of Biden inflation, but then in recent videos, I've mentioned inflation is currently way below the Fed's target, while job growth could certainly use that money better than using it to siphon profits to bankers. Of course, with 70% of Wall Street profits in play, bank lobbyists will be burning up the steak dinners and campaign donations to keep it going. Okay. We'll be watching.
See you next time.