Why Pay Interest on Excess Reserve Balances?

Laura Lipscomb, Antoine Martin and Heather Wiggins
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Laura Lipscomb: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/laura-lipscomb.htm

No 20170927, Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: In a previous post, we described some reasons why it is beneficial to pay interest on required reserve balances. Here we turn to arguments in favor of paying interest on excess reserve balances. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and former Vice Chairman Donald Kohn recently discussed many potential benefits of paying interest on excess reserve balances and some common misunderstandings, including that paying interest on reserves restricts bank lending and provides a subsidy to banks. In this post, we focus primarily on benefits related to the efficiency of the payment system and the reduction in the need for the provision of credit by the Fed when operating in a framework of abundant reserves.

Keywords: monetary policy; reserve requirements; interest on reserves (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-09-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-mac and nep-mon
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