[landemva]

> in possession of a mystical lever, a single number that they can change to steer the behavior

Federal Reserve has more than one lever. They set bank reserve ratios. They engage in outright buying of underwater (mispriced) paper through quantitative easing. They created a new program this year to swap SVB's mispriced bond holdings at par. It's time to reel in Federal Reserve and reel in government deficit spending.

[cykros]

They can also change initial margin requirements (Reg T), but this hasn't been done in decades. Neither have reserve requirements been changed since they were dropped to zero in the wake of the GFC.

They do have a few numbers though. The Federal Funds rate isn't actually directly set by them, but rather, targeted, using other policy to "enforce" that target (in the form of open market operations -- buying and selling securities) For what it's worth, it's amusing that they talk about the FF rate at all, given how vacant the market itself has been since the GFC (down to about $100B/night), as few care to engage in unsecured lending in the first place now that we all are painfully aware of counter-party risk. They do, however, directly set the reverse repo rate, the discount window rate (aka Primary Credit), and the prime rate (though, how much prime matters these days is a matter for debate).

[landemva]

> reverse repo rate

Thanks for the reminder! I recall Fed was involved with something in reverse repo 6 months before virus blew up.

Federal Reserve has so many levers it becomes questionable that anyone understands medium to long term impacts. And FDIC works closely with Fed on bank bailouts like SVB.

[arvinsim]

I would think more of in terms that there is a single mystical entity that can change the behavior. And that entity is the Federal Reserve.

[HDThoreaun]

QE is not buying mispriced assets.