central bank

Central banks also have other important functions, of a less-general nature. These typically include acting as fiscal agent of the government, supervising the operations of the commercial banking system, clearing checks, administering exchange-control systems, serving as correspondents for foreign central banks and official international financial institutions, and, in the case of central banks of the major industrial nations, participating in cooperative international currency arrangements designed to help stabilize or regulate the foreign-exchange rates of the participating countries.

(Read Milton Friedman’s Britannica entry on money.)

Central banks are operated for the public welfare and not for maximum profit. The modern central bank has had a long evolution, dating back to the establishment of the Bank of Sweden in 1668. In the process, central banks have become varied in authority, autonomy, functions, and instruments of action. Virtually everywhere, however, there has been a vast and explicit broadening of central-bank responsibility for promoting domestic economic stability and growth and for defending the international value of the currency. There also has been increased emphasis on the interdependence of monetary and other national economic policies, especially fiscal and debt-management policies. Equally, a widespread recognition of the need for international monetary cooperation has evolved, and central banks have played a major role in developing the institutional arrangements that have given form to such cooperation.

The broadened responsibilities of central banks in the second half of the 20th century were accompanied by greater government interest in their policies; in a number of countries, institutional changes, in a variety of forms, were designed to limit the traditional independence of the central bank from the government. Central-bank independence, however, really rests much more on the degree of public confidence in the wisdom of the central bank’s actions and the objectivity of the bank’s leadership than on any legal provisions purporting to give it autonomy or to limit its freedom of action.

Central banks traditionally regulate the money supply by expanding and contracting their assets. An increase in a central bank’s assets causes a corresponding increase in its deposit liabilities (or note issue), and these, in turn, provide the funds that serve as the cash reserves of the commercial banking system—reserves that commercial banks, by law or custom, must maintain, generally in a prescribed proportion of their own deposit liabilities. As banks acquire larger cash balances with the central bank, they are in a position to expand their own credit operations and deposit liabilities to a point where the new, larger cash reserves no longer produce a reserve ratio greater than the minimum set by law or custom. A reverse process occurs when the central bank contracts the volume of its assets and liabilities.

There are six ways by which central banks typically alter the volume of their assets:

1. “Open-market operations” consist mainly of purchases and sales of government securities or other eligible paper, but operations in bankers’ acceptances and in certain other types of paper often are permissible. Open-market operations are an effective instrument of monetary regulation only in countries with well-developed securities markets. Open-market sales of securities by the central bank drain cash reserves from the commercial banks. This loss of reserves tends to force some banks to borrow from the central bank, at least temporarily. Banks faced with the cost of such borrowing, at what may well be a high discount rate, and also faced with the possibility of being admonished by the central bank about their lending policies typically become more restrictive and selective in extending credit. Open-market sales, by reducing the capacity of the banking system to extend credit and by tending to drive down the prices of the securities sold, also tend to raise the interest rates charged and paid by banks. The rise in government security yields and in the interest rates charged and paid by banks forces other financial institutions to offer a higher rate of return on their obligations, in order to be competitive, and, given the reduced availability of bank credit, enables them, like banks, to command a higher rate of return on their loans. Thus, the impact of open-market sales is not limited to the banking system; it is diffused throughout the economy. Conversely, purchases of securities by the central bank tend to lead to credit expansion by the financial system and to lower interest rates, unless the demand for credit is rising at a faster rate than the supply, which normally is the case once an inflationary process gets under way; interest rates then will rise rather than fall.

Changes in domestic money-market rates resulting from central-bank actions also tend to change the prevailing relations between domestic and foreign money-market rates, and this, in turn, may set in motion short-term capital flows into or out of the country.

2. Loans to banks, generally called “discounts” or “rediscounts,” are short-term advances against commercial paper or government securities to enable banks to meet seasonal or other special temporary needs either for loanable funds or for cash reserves to replace reserves lost as a result of a shrinkage in deposits. The Bank of England ordinarily deals with discount houses rather than directly with banks, but the effect on bank reserves is similar. The provision of such advances is one of the oldest and most traditional functions of central banks. The rate of interest charged is known as the “discount rate,” or “rediscount rate.” By raising or lowering the rate, the central bank can regulate the cost of such borrowing. The level of and changes in the rate also indicate the view of the central bank on the desirability of greater tightness or ease in credit conditions.

Some central banks, especially in countries that lack a broad capital market, extend medium- and long-term credit to banks and to government development corporations in order to facilitate the financing of domestic economic-development expenditures and to alleviate the deficiency of financial savings. Such longer-term lending is not regarded as an appropriate central-bank activity by many authorities, however, and is considered a dangerous source of inflationary pressures.

3. Direct government borrowing from central banks generally is frowned upon as encouraging fiscal irresponsibility and commonly is subject to statutory limitation; nevertheless, in many countries the central bank is the only large source of credit for the government and is used extensively. In other countries indirect support of government financing operations has monetary effects that differ little from those that would have followed from an equal amount of direct financing by the central bank.

4. Central banks buy and sell foreign exchange to stabilize the international value of their own currency. The central banks of major industrial nations engage in so-called “currency swaps,” in which they lend one another their own currencies in order to facilitate their activities in stabilizing their exchange rates. Prior to the 1930s, the authority of most central banks to expand the money supply was limited by statutory requirements that restricted the capacity of the central bank to issue currency and (less commonly) to incur deposit liabilities to the volume of the central bank’s international reserves. Such requirements have been lowered or eliminated by most countries, however, either because they blocked expansions of the money supply at times when expansion was considered essential to domestic economic-policy objectives or because they “locked up” gold or foreign exchange needed for payments abroad.

5. Many central banks have the authority to fix and to vary, within limits, the minimum cash reserves that banks must hold against their deposit liabilities. In some countries the reserve requirements against deposits provide for the inclusion of certain assets in addition to cash. Generally, the purpose of such inclusion is to encourage or require banks to invest in those assets to a greater extent than they otherwise would be inclined to do and thus to limit the extension of credit for other purposes. Similarly, especially lower discount rates sometimes are used to encourage specific types of credit, such as to agriculture, housing, and small businesses.

6. In periods of intense inflationary pressure and shortage of supplies, especially during wartime and immediately thereafter, many governments have felt a need to impose direct measures to curb the availability of credit for particular purposes—such as the purchase of consumer durables, houses, and nonessential imported goods—and often have had these controls administered by their central banks. Such controls typically establish maximum loan-value to purchase-price ratios and maximum maturities that must be prescribed by lenders. These controls often apply to nonbank lenders as well as to bank lenders, and this is necessary for effectiveness in countries in which nonbank lenders are important sources of the types of credit being curbed. The general experience of central banks with direct credit controls has not been favourable; opportunities for evasion are too easy, especially if overall credit conditions are not extremely tight, and inequities in the impact of the controls become socially and politically troublesome. An early example of selective credit-control authority vested in a central bank and one that, on balance, has worked tolerably well is the authority conferred on the U.S. Federal Reserve Board in 1934 to establish margin requirements on stock-market credit. (See money.)