Global rate cuts: attacking the symptom?

After yesterday’s move by the Fed into the commercial paper market, today’s big news is a global interest rate cut, including the Fed, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of England, among others. The effect of an interest rate cut should be to reduce borrowing costs across the board, which is a good thing for the real economy. However, the rate cut may not have a direct impact on the crisis at the heart of the financial system, which is that banks are not lending to each other. To put this in perspective, the spread between 3-month inter-bank lending rates and 3-month Treasury bill rates – a measure of how willing banks are to lend money to each other, as opposed to socking it away in risk-free Treasury bills – is running at about 4 percentage points. Ordinarily, it should be about 0.5 percentage points. As a matter of simple arithmetic, a 0.5 percentage point cut in central bank interest rates is small compared to a 3.5 percentage point increase in risk premia. As long as lenders are afraid their borrowers could go bankrupt, lowering the cost the lenders pay for money will only slightly lower the price that they charge for money.

Still, though, today’s move is a valuable signal that the world’s central bankers are on the same page and that they will do whatever they can to fight the crisis. And the good news may have come from the United Kingdom, where the government announced a straight-up bank recapitalization plan, in which 25 billion pounds will be used to buy preferred shares in eight banks, and another 25 billion pounds will be allocated to buy shares in those or other banks. Banks that have more capital are less likely to go bankrupt, making other players more willing to lend to them. As we’ve pointed out before, the Paulson Plan may have the indirect effect of increasing bank capital (because we expect Treasury to overpay for the securities it buys under the plan), but uncertainty over how that will work has diluted its impact on the markets. Explicit bank recapitalization is a more direct way to attack the problem.