[...]... because of its management of the payments system that banks themselves use When one bank makes a payment to another, the mechanism involves changing entries on the balance sheet of the central bank; there is a debit to the account of the bank paying and a credit to the account of the bank being paid Here, in the requirement to settle net payments every day on the books of the central bank, we find the. .. more or less severely The seductive allure of present credit and the crushing burden of future debt are two faces of the same creature The Inherent Instability of Credit The two faces of credit show themselves not only at the level of each individual, but also at the level of the system as a whole because one person's cash inflow is another person's cash outflow If the allure of credit induces one... approach to understanding the recent credit crisis, and by drawing lessons from that crisis for the future The main lesson is that a modern money view requires updating Bagehot's conception of the central bank as a "lender of last resort. " Under the conditions of the New Lombard Street, the central bank is better conceptualized as a "dealer of last resort. " E Lombard Street, Old and New Writing in 1967,... price After the Fed- Treasury Accord of 1951, the Fed no longer fixed the price of Treasury securities but it did continue to provide liquidity support to the Treasury market Eventually, even that responsibility passed on to the primary dealers, with the Fed backing up the dealers by providing liquidity support to them through its daily operations m Treasury repo Here then IS how the New Lombard Street... used the discount rate to manage the system, the Fed focuses its attention on the price of overnight lending in the federal funds market, which is an interbank market for deposits at the Fed (An overnight federal funds loan involves receipt of reserve funds today in return for payment of reserve funds tomorrow.) The Fed does not directly lend or borrow in the federal funds market, so the "effective" federal... demand Instead the Fed uses the Treasury repo market to control the supply of the underlying deposits that are borrowed and lent in the federal funds market The Fed' s monopoly supply of bank reserves gives it considerable control over the federal funds market, but there is quite a bit of slippage between conditions in the federal funds market and funding liquidity more generally The Fed is only a small... of the Fed' s balance sheet as it sold off its Treasury securities (to the former lenders) to fund new loans (to the former borrowers), and then an explosion of the Fed' s balance sheet as it expanded its deposit liabilities (to the former lenders), and used the proceeds to fund additional lending (to the former borrowers) The Fed' s response to the crisis can be understood as a modern adaptation of the. .. had been the source of liquidity for most American banks in the years before the Fed The framers knew this, but they viewed it as part of the problem that they were trying to fix In the event, and notwithstanding the framers' best legislative efforts, the act did not succeed in replacing the indigenous system of "artificial" liquidity with an idealized system of "natural" liquidity Rather the act merely... known as the "haircut"; the purpose of the haircut is to provide extra collateral for the loan, so the size of the haircut varies with the perceived riskiness of the asset being used for collateral The lowest repo rates, and the lowest haircuts, apply when the collateral for the loan is a Treasury bill In our world, the Treasury repo market plays a special role as the main interface between the money... assuming they could be identified and agreed on (In such a situation, even control of aggregate credit can be quite difficult.) In the last analysis, the only dependable source of leverage over the system as a whole is the role of the central bank as a banker's bank If banks are the quintessential financial institution because of their management of the retail payments system, then the cen tral bank is the . LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PtJBLICATION DATA Mehrling, Perry. The new Lombard Street: how the Fed became the dealer of last resort I Perry Mehrling. p. cm. Includes bibliographical. "lender of last resort. " Under the conditions of the New Lombard Street, the central bank is better conceptualized as a " ;dealer of last resort. " E Lombard Street,. Lombard Street, Old and New The Inherent Instability of Credit The Old Lombard Street The New Lombard Street Two Origins of the Present System From National Banking to the Fed