U.S. Injecting Billions Into Foreign Central Banks
Published on 03-18-2009

Source: Huffington Post

For more than a year, the U.S. Federal Reserve System has been increasingly acting as the world’s central bank, injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into foreign government treasuries in an effort to increase liquidity in those countries.

The foreign central banks have used the U.S. currency to bail out financial institutions within their borders. The Fed program links its balance sheet directly to the fates of foreign central banks at a time when they’re on the ropes.

The program has so far gone unreported in the mainstream media and is a major expansion of Federal Reserve involvement in the global economy. It represents a stark break from the prior role of the Fed, moving it into territory more traditionally occupied by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The program puts both the Fed and the foreign central banks at increased risk. If the bailed-out banks can’t repay the loans, the foreign central bank is still on the hook to the Fed. It would have to raise the money by selling debt — which most Europeans are finding difficult today — or raise taxes or cut spending, actions that further exacerbate the economic crisis. Or, the foreign central bank could default, leaving the U.S. holding a bag of foreign currency of plummeting value.

The U.S. taxpayer has also bailed out foreign banks indirectly by pumping billions into American Insurance Group, which announced Sunday that it had forwarded that cash to counterparties that include foreign banks such as Societe Generale, Deutsche Bank, Calyon, Credit Suisse, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays.

“I’m concerned about Europe,” Paul Krugman wrote in Monday’s New York Times. “Actually, I’m concerned about the whole world — there are no safe havens from the global economic storm. But the situation in Europe worries me even more than the situation in America.”

Meanwhile, European countries are still unable to sell joint bonds.

The Fed program adds up to serious money. The most recent balance sheet released by the Fed shows that $314 billion U.S. dollars are currently doled out to foreign central banks under the foreign exchange program. That’s down from a December peak of nearly $600 billion, as central banks have repaid some of the loans.
Story continues below

In exchange for U.S. dollars, the Fed has received foreign currency of equivalent value in an exchange known as a swap. To protect the Fed from losses due to currency fluctuation, the deals include a provision that when the moneys are swapped back, the transaction will be done at the same exchange rate as the initial transaction.

The swaps are listed by the Fed on its balance sheet as “central bank liquidity swaps.” The only reference to such swaps in Nexis or Google News comes in the trade paper Market News International, which publishes periodic summaries of fluctuations in the Fed balance sheet. The Fed hasn’t hid the exchanges and even sports an FAQ about the transactions on its Web site.

The Fed has established relationships with some major banks, such as the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan, but also with central banks overseeing smaller, more volatile economies, such as the Banco Central do Brasil.

“It is important which countries are getting it and which don’t,” said Ralph Bryant, a currency exchange expert at the Brookings Institution. During the 1970s, he was director of the Fed’s Division of International Finance and lead international economist for the Federal Open Market Committee, which has authorized the swaps.

Read Full Article Here…