Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Where's all of the new money Going?

Mish's Global Economic Trends has a great post showing just where all of the new funny money is going. Here's the gist of it.
Base money is soaring but all of it is sitting in bank reserves. In other words, banks are not lending. Clearly we have a huge monetary distortion, but banks seem to understand that lending money in this environment would do nothing but increase losses.
The charts show wild increases in the money supply, but decreases in the amount of money actually in circulation. Banks are hoarding it. To me, this looks like a great recipe for wild inflation down the road, but I'm no expert.

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