How does the Fed “create” money out of nothing?

Answer: It is a four-step process. But first a word on bonds. Bonds are simply promises to pay — or government IOUs. People buy bonds to get a secure rate of interest. At the end of the term of the bond, the government repays the principal, plus interest (if not paid periodically), and the bond is destroyed. There are trillions of dollars worth of these bonds at present. Now here is the Fed moneymaking process:

Step 1. The Fed Open Market Committee approves the purchase of U.S. Bonds on the open market.

Step 2. The bonds are purchased by the New York Fed Bank from whomever is offering them for sale on the open market.

Step 3. The Fed pays for the bonds with electronic credits to the seller’s bank, which in turn credits the seller’s bank account. These credits are based on nothing tangible. The Fed just creates them.

Step 4. The banks use these deposits as reserves. Most banks may loan out ten times (10x) the amount of their reserves to new borrowers, all at interest.

In this way, a Fed purchase of, say a million dollars worth of bonds, gets turned into over 10 million dollars in bank deposits. The Fed, in effect, creates 10% of this totally new money and the banks create the other 90%.

This also explains why the Fed consistently holds about 10% of the total US Treasury bonds. It had to buy those (with accounts or Fed notes the Fed simply created) from the public in order to provide the base for the rest of the money the private banks then get to create, most of which eventually winds up being used to purchase Treasury bonds, thus supplying Congress with the borrowed money to pay for its expenditures.

Due to a number of important exceptions to the 10% reserve ratio, some loans require less than 10% reserves, and many no (0%) reserves, making it possible for banks to create many times more than ten times the money they have in “reserve”. Due to these exceptions from the 10% reserve requirement, the Fed creates only a little under 2% of the total US money supply, while private banks create the other 98%.

To reduce the amount of money in the economy, the process is just reversed — the Fed sells bonds to the public, and money flows out of the purchaser’s local bank. Loans must be reduced by ten times the amount of the sale. So a Fed sale of a million dollars in bonds, results in 10 million dollars less money in the economy.