Fed i niske kamatne stope

This understanding, however, runs up against three inconvenient facts. First, the Fed has not been dominating the Treasury market. At the end of 2012, the Fed held only 15 percent of all marketable Treasury securities, roughly the same share it has held over the past decade. This means that the largest-ever run-up of public debt was financed mostly by individual investors, their financial intermediaries, and foreigners. Second, the Fed’s forward guidance on interest rates is itself shaped by the Fed’s forecast of the economy. The Fed, then, is not independently shaping the future path of interest rates, but is responding to what it thinks will happen to the economy in the future. Finally, long-term interest rates on safe government debt across the world have fallen: Very similar sustained declines in government-bond yields have occurred over the past four years in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan, as the graph below shows. It is far easier to explain these declines as a function of a weak global economy than to attribute them to an overactive, all-powerful Fed.

Empirical studies, however, suggest that the effect of these purchases is nowhere near powerful enough to explain the persistent decline of long-term interest rates. The ten-year Treasury, for example, has gone from about 5.25 percent in 2007 to just over 2 percent today. If these purchases were truly adding a large monetary stimulus, we would expect to see long-term interest rates rise, not fall, from the resulting higher expected inflation and, to the extent the stimulus works, an improved economic outlook.