Is Fedwire Still a Subsidy That Fully Recovers Its Cost?

William Bergman
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William Bergman: Loyola University

No inetwp237, Working Papers Series from Institute for New Economic Thinking

Abstract: This paper examines the Federal Reserve's current financial losses—unprecedented in scale—and the questionable accounting practices it uses to downplay their impact. It argues that the Fed's self-defined accounting standards, particularly the creation of a "deferred asset" to mask negative equity, obscure the fiscal consequences for the U.S. government and taxpayers. The analysis connects today's losses to longstanding institutional practices, notably the Fed's flawed cost-recovery accounting for its Fedwire payment system. These issues first emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the author, then a Fed staffer, challenged the internal logic used to claim that Fedwire guaranteed payments and still avoided subsidies. The paper includes as an appendix the original 2002 draft, "Fedwire: A Subsidy That Fully Recovers Its Cost?", which helped reveal the moral hazard and accounting inconsistencies that contributed to the 2008 crisis and continue to shape central bank risk and governance today.

Keywords: Federal Reserve; Central bank accounting; Fedwire; daylight overdrafts; Payment systems; financial crisis; monetary policy; financial regulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E0 E42 E58 G28 H83 L50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2024-07-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-his, nep-inv, nep-mon and nep-pay
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:thk:wpaper:inetwp237

DOI: 10.36687/inetwp237

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