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Comment by sjtindell | Hacker News Reader

I read somewhere that in the US some banks took the QE money and put it back into their accounts with the Fed where it collected interest. Rather than lend it out, they essentially got paid just to hold it. There’s an economic argument saying that it made them safer, etc. but it doesn’t sound quite right to me.

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While I am not familiar with the story you are referring to, it does not sound weird to me. Given that QE works by the central bank buying risky assets (initially government bonds), presumably the banks received the QE money by selling higher yielding(given that even during QE the rate curve was mostly upward sloping) government bonds to the federal reserve than the interest rate they earned by depositing said money at the federal reserve. This would seem an irrational move from the banks unless they had some additional use for the cash compared to the government bonds?

This is actually complex. But QE, in most cases but not all (for example, QE3) involved the purchase of assets from the non-bank sector, not purchases from banks (in the US, banks do not hold a large amount of US govt securities).

When QE did involve the purchase of assets from banks (i.e. QE3 with MBS/ABS purchases, and in the EU where banks held a lot of govt debt) then it did lead to increase lending but the effect varied significantly (for example, in the EU the effect was tiny because most banks in the region are functionally insolvent).

So QE is not thought to have any particular effect on bank lending, and is generally not used with that aim in mind now. I think this was thought to be true in 2008 but we know now that it has no/little effect (i.e. QE is mainly effective through portfolio rebalancing). And central banks that did try to increase bank lending (the UK in the mid-2010s, and the ECB...always) use other techniques (i.e. FLS, LTRO...which, iirc, are direct lending to commercial banks by central banks...I think, I don't follow this stuff closely anymore).

Just generally too, if commercial banks are holding a lot of govt debt then that is usually a sign of problems elsewhere (i.e. the EU).

Banks don’t lend out money from central banks. Never have.

Banks can only store reserves in accounts at the central bank because only banks can have such accounts.

What they get is money from the central bank in interest for holding those reserves and that effectively subsides lending a bit - at least until the interest rate drops so low that people are tempted to draw out cash

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