No ‘Pat on the Back’ for the Federal Reserve

Published in The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Cochrane writes that “the Fed can costlessly buy bonds and issue interest-paying money.” To the contrary, by following exactly this formula, the Fed has so far accumulated net losses of about $130 billion for itself, the Treasury and the taxpayers, and there are unavoidably tens of billions in losses still to come.

This “costless” formula meant the Fed took massive interest-rate risk, investing very long and borrowing very short, thereby also imposing that risk on the Treasury and the taxpayers. For the Fed as for anybody else, taking interest-rate risk isn’t costless. It has proved far more costly than the Fed ever expected.

Alex J. Pollock

Senior fellow, Mises Institute