When times are tough (think: recessions), everyone feels more like saving than spending. If you didn’t already lose your job, lots of people around you did. Now’s not the time to buy that new gaming console. It’s time to save up, in case you’re next.
Yet that’s just the problem with recessions. They’re sustained by people not spending. If you think about what the economy is in the first place: it’s spending. When you spend, you create income for other people, and investment for other companies. Then those people and companies spend, and around and around we go: the merry-go-round of the economy.
Stimulus packages are measures designed to get people to spend, even when everything around them is telling them to save. This is a mainstay of Keynesian economics, which is the status quo of most major macroeconomic policies today.
Keynes was all about getting people to spend...but how? Stimulus packages can include anything that encourages people to spend. Maybe tax cuts, or stimulus checks. Maybe an increase in government spending, or public works programs. Maybe pumping more money into the system via quantitative easing. Maybe cutting interest rates, so borrowing is cheap. Some countries have even done a negative interest rate, which means they’ll pay you to take out a loan. Yeah. That happened.
If your head wasn’t under a rock in 2008 and 2009, you’ll know that the U.S. executed a fat ($787 billion) stimulus package via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It included tax breaks, spending projects for job creation, and multiple types of assistance. Sometimes, people just need a nudge before they’ll put their hand in their wallets again.
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Finance: What is the Federal Funds Rate?22 Views
Finance a la shmoop what is the federal funds rate? all right think about it like
a suggested tip amount at a restaurant or on uber or lyft and you're going to [Man stood outside Pete's Pizza store]
gauge how your waiter or driver will react to that number
warmly coldly or well that's basically what the federal funds rates intentions
are as it relates to heating up or cooling down the economy well the Fed
heats and cools via the manner in which it rents money to its henchmen, the US
banking system that is in the most basic vanilla transaction the Fed rents money [Briefcase of cash lands outside Federal State building]
to banks for 1% a year and those banks then turn around and market that
money in the form of loans for homes and cars and re rents
that money with a big fat markup at three four five six seven eight percent
or more well a fair number of deadbeats exist on the planet they don't pay back [people appear all across a map of earth]
the money they promised to pay back and while sometimes the bank has to eat the
dough they loaned or at least incur a lot of lawyer bills chasing down the [Lawyer chasing man in a car]
deadbeats and in the event of a calamitous economic situation well,
banks need to be rock-solid so they can't lend out every dollar they have
that is they have to keep a fair amount of equity on their books so that if bad
things really do happen then they have what are called reserves well the bank [Bank reserve vault of cash appears]
also keeps reserves for direct daily deposits so that someday when a bunch of
people come in for their cash the bank can't turn their pockets inside out and [Person turns pocket inside out]
say yeah sorry we gave it all to the nice man wanting to buy a sports car
well that kind of thing leads to panic and disaster and it has sadly in our
country's history when a third of the banks went bankrupt in the Great
Depression so what happens when a bank has less money than it legally needs to
have as a reserve? well it borrows money in a short-term overnight loan from
either the Federal Reserve Bank or from other banks that keep their own reserves [Money transfers from Federal Reserve to bank]
at the Federal Reserve sort of like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul keeping
all that reserve grid number uh steady all right well now
we all know that borrowing money is not free
if a bank borrows overnight from other banks it is charged an interest rate at
the current federal funds rate the Federal Reserve influences that rate
while banks just need to be careful about paying back those loans because
stiffing the Fed is significantly more dangerous to your life than
sniffing your waiter at Applebee's [Object hits man outside Applebee's]
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The Federal Open Market Committee's purpose is to manage financial outcomes through monetary policy.
