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economicpolicyjournal.com. How the Federal Reserve Just Hid Important Data One of the most important data points released by the Federal Reserve has been the amount of excess reserves sitting at the Federal Reserve. Prior to Ben Bernanke paying interest on these reserves, they hardly climbed above $1 billion. After Bernanke announced that he would start paying interest on such reserves, they have skyrocketed. They are now nearly at $2 trillion.
Here's a chart from the St Louis Federal Reserve showing what happened:
This is important data because these reserves are sitting at the Fed and not in the economy bidding up goods and service. If banks start pulling this money out of the Fed and making loans with the money, the money supply will explode, as well as price inflation.
This must be watched closely. But notice something about this chart, the chart title says the series is discontinued. Got that? One of the most important data points is no longer reported by the Federal Reserve.
But is the data really no longer reported? Not quite. The Fed just changed the name for the data (and possibly altered its calculation slightly). The Fed is no longer reporting excess reserves, but instead is pretty much reporting the same thing as Balances maintained that exceed the top of the penalty- free band. This is a cute way for the Fed to erase the connection between pre-Bernanke excess reserves, the massive spike in reserves and the current situation. The data was reported in the old format for 54 years, that is since 1959.
You can see what the old format H.3 release was like and the long series of data, here:
http://federalreserve.gov/releases/h3/20130705/. Notice the simple clear data with a column marked excess reserves. That data was from last week. Now take a look at the new data being put out under the same H.3 release, here:
http://federalreserve.gov/releases/h3/current/The excess reserve column is gone and replaced with Balances maintained that exceed the top of the penalty- free band. Notice that the new data point has just one data point, all the historical data about excess reserves is gone from the current release. Poof! Fifty four years of history, that show how Bernanke has created an insane excess reserves problem, is now relegated to the dust bins. From here on out, Balances maintained that exceed the top of the penalty- free band (formerly known as excess reserves) will show a starting number of $1.977 trillion, rather than the decades under $1 billion.
