On Wednesday the Federal Reserve reduced its target for the fed funds rate to 2.00%, the latest in a series of reductions that started from 5.25% in September 2007. In its April 28 editorial entitled “The Fed’s Bender” (also linked to by Frank Stephenson below) the Wall St. Journal refers these target rate reductions as “easy money,” “easier money,” and “the Fed's decision to open the general monetary spigots”. Normally rate-cutting and monetary expansion do go hand in hand. An injection of new base money shifts the supply curve for fed funds rightward and, given a constant demand curve, drives down the price.

But in the present case, the Fed is not vigorously expanding the monetary base. Here, courtesy the St. Louis Fed, are the data for the adjusted monetary base:

2007-03-01 813.857
2007-09-01 820.020
2008-03-01 825.613

The base is up only 1.4% over the last twelve months, only 0.6% over the last six months. (Above figures are the Board of Governors adjusted base; the St. Louis adjusted base tells the same story.) These numbers suggest that the Fed’s rate adjustments are not driving the market’s fed funds rate down by injecting base money, but have largely been following the market rate down. The demand curve for fed funds must be shifting inward, because the supply curve is hardly shifting outward.

Some of the broader monetary aggregates are growing. M1 is flat. But M2, which has shown a fairly stable velocity in recent years, is up about 7 percent over a year ago. This is consistent with market forecasts of higher price inflation. (MZM is up about 15 percent, but its velocity has been dropping.) Why the M2 money multiplier (M2/base) should be rising in this way is unclear, but the current growth of M2 (or MZM) is not due to Fed injections of base money.

Standard monetary policy rules seem to give a mixed picture. McCallum’s Rule for base money growth, as tracked by the St. Louis Fed, indicates that recent Fed policy has not been very expansionary: recent base growth has been consistent with a price inflation rate of only 1%. On the other hand the Taylor Rule for the fed funds target, with PCE inflation currently running above 3%, indicates that the current fed funds target is much too low to be consistent with 1% inflation, and even too low to be consistent with 4% inflation. But the Taylor Rule, at least in the form tracked by the St. Louis Fed does not incorporate any adjustment for shocks to the demand for fed funds (independent of inflation and real GDP). This may explain why it seems a poor guide at present to inferring the degree of monetary ease.