In a sense, kind of. If your friend is expected to be able to pay for his own lunch (because it's costly to keep covering for him) and only very sporadically need to borrow from you (because e.g. he forgot his wallet), and suddenly you find yourself doing it every day for several days at a time...
Then yes, it's worse than your friend having to "borrow $10 [once]" from you, even if it's not as bad as him having a $50 shortfall (esp since he does pay you back).
It also means your friend is making a systematic error he's not correcting, and you should probably start charging him more to, in effect, carry his money for him. If you don't, you're enabling his dependence.
Similarly, banks are expected to only very sporadically need liquidity directly from the Fed. If they need it over such long intervals, that's bad, and the daily amount borrowed, by itself, understates the significance. It also feels like the Fed isn't doing its job if the banks aren't paying (and savers aren't receiving) a premium for such an unusually scarce service.
If someone tells me that the NY Fed is looking to significantly (>25%) increase its overnight and short-term liquidity operations and the necessary increases are in the range of tens of billions of dollars then that already sounds pretty important. I don't see how anything you said is an argument that cumulative liquidity is an appropriate measure here. Instead we both seem to agree that if someone had said - the loans are only $150 billion (because that seems to be the one day aggregate limit) then that person would also be misleading.
My point is not that this isn't an important issue but rather that it is an important issue and as such it deserves serious coverage and the linked article is not it.
I agreed that accumulating the entire amount is also the wrong way to account for it (but was pointing out that the daily amount is also an error in the other direction):
>>even if it's not as bad as him having a $50 shortfall (esp since he does pay you back).
Your friend is a reckless speculator. He lends $10 with you as an underwriter and your wife says it's fine, but I'm going to check every evening he has at least $1 so we at least know he hasn't lost it all.
So every night just before your wife goes to check, you run ahead and lend him quickly the difference between what he still has and the $1 he needs. Your wife checks, he shows her the $1 in his wallet, she leaves and he pays you back the loan you made him a minute before.
If I plan on bailing out his broke ass for the next 5 days, then I have to set aside $50 to do so regardless of whether or not he actually repays me on time. This is closer to the actual situation at hand.
https://apps.newyorkfed.org/markets/autorates/tomo-results-d...
I'm trying to avoid pedantic arguments and focus our discussion on the safeties and how effective they can be when the unthinkable happens.