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Helicopter Money: The Illusion of A Free Lunch - VOX, CEPR's Policy Portal
Helicopter Money: The Illusion of A Free Lunch - VOX, CEPR's Policy Portal
As central banks have been testing the limits of unconventional monetary policies, many observers have started
to consider more radical options. One that has been gaining ground is that of helicopter money (Friedman
1969) or, more soberly described, overt money finance of government deficits (Turner 2015). Proponents see it
as a sure-fire way to boost nominal spending by harnessing central banks most primitive power: their unique
ability to create non-interest bearing money at will and at negligible costs. But does this really represent an
additional tool for monetary policy or is it simply a reformulation of what central banks have done so far, albeit
with greater fanfare?
In one type, excess reserves are remunerated at a rate below the policy rate (Figure 1, left-hand panel) the
most common scheme. In this case, achieving the desired interest rate target requires that the central bank finetunes the amount of reserves to meet the interest-insensitive demand (R ), which is typically a small, frictional
amount. Failure to do so would generate significant volatility in the overnight interest rate. Any excess would
drive it to the floor set by the remuneration on excess reserves (zero or the rate on any standing deposit facility),
as banks seek to get rid of unwanted balances by lending in the overnight interbank market. Any shortfall would
lead to potential settlement difficulties, driving the rate to unacceptably high levels or to the ceiling set by endof-day lending facilities. The Reserve Bank of Australia, for example, operates such a scheme, with no reserve
requirement. Note the small and stable amount of excess reserves, spikes aside (right-hand panel of Figure 1).
The central bank then sets the rate wherever it wishes, by signalling and/or operating at that rate.
In the alternative scheme, the central bank remunerates excess reserves at the policy rate typically the deposit
facility rate (Figure 2, left-hand panel). It then supplies more balances than necessary for settlement purposes
so as to operate on the horizontal portion of the demand for bank reserves. This sets banks opportunity cost of
holding reserves to zero, as they become a very close substitute for other short-term liquid assets. The central
bank can then supply as much as it likes at that rate. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand represents a good
example, having moved in 2006 to such a framework (right-hand panel of Figure 2), after having hitherto
operated as in scheme 1. Many major central banks, including the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England,
have been operating under such a scheme post-crisis.
Figure 2
In either case, interest rates can be set quite independently of the amount of reserves in the system. A given
quantity of reserves is consistent with many different levels of interest rates; conversely, the same interest rate
obtains with different amounts of reserves. The decoupling of interest rates from reserves is obviously well
known to central banks but, surprisingly, it has not yet found its way into textbooks and economic thinking
more generally. It is discussed in detail in Borio and Disyatat 2010, Disyatat 2008, Borio 1997 and Keister et al.
2008.
References
Borio, C (1997), The implementation of monetary policy in industrial countries: a survey, BIS Economic
Papers, no 47.
Borio, C and P Disyatat (2010), Unconventional monetary policies: an appraisal, The Manchester School,
78(s1), pp 5389, September. Also available as BIS Working Papers, no 292, November 2009.
Bernanke, B (2016), What tools does the Fed have left? Part 3: Helicopter money, Ben Bernankes Blog,
Brookings Institute, April 11.
Buiter, W (2014), The simple analytics of helicopter money: Why it works always; Economics, vol 8, 201428, August.
Dervi, K (2016), Time for helicopter money?, Project Syndicate, 3 March.
Disyatat, P (2008), Monetary policy implementation: misconceptions and their consequences, BIS Working
Papers, no 269.
Friedman, M (1969), The optimum quantity of money, in Milton Friedman, The Optimum Quantity of Money
and Other Essays, Chapter 1. Adline Publishing Company: Chicago.
Gal, J (2014), The effects of a money-financed fiscal stimulus, CEPR Discussion Paper 10165.
Grenville, S (2013), Helicopter money, VoxEU, 24 February.
Keister, T, A Martin and J McAndrews (2008), "Divorcing money from monetary policy," Economic Policy
Review, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, September, pp 41-56.
Reichlin, L, A Turner and M Woodford (2013), Helicopter money as a policy option, VoxEU, 20 May.
Turner, A (2015), The Case for Monetary Finance An Essentially Political Issue, paper presented at
Sixteenth Jacques Polak Annual Research Conference, International Monetary Fund.
Endnotes
[1] Turner (2015) sees overt monetary financing as a way of avoiding the unwelcome consequences of low
interest rates, such as excessive risk-taking and increased debt. Dervi (2016) also advocates helicopter money
partly as a way to avoid the negative consequences of maintaining low interest rates for too long.
[2] For simplicity, here we avoid the complications that arise when reserve requirements have averaging
provisions, which do not really affect our argument. For the details, see Borio (1997).
[3] Conceptually, it is possible that the demand for reserves grows over time until at some point excess reserves
are eliminated. In practice, this would take an exceedingly long time. The most probable case is when banks are
subject to a reserve requirement fixed as a proportion of outstanding deposits. As the latter grow, demand for
reserves to fulfil the requirement increases. But this is a very gradual process.
[4] Of course, there is a maturity dimension too. This would be equivalent to financing at the overnight rate, as
opposed to a longer-term rate.
[5] More elaborate schemes involving remunerating reserves but recouping the cost through a separate levy on
banks (Bernanke 2016) amount to the same thing: tax-financed deficit spending.