What Monetary Expansion Looks Like (update)
As I wrote about a month and a half ago, it’s news to just about nobody that the central banks of the world are expanding their balance sheets. But the scale of the Fed’s expansion left my eyes popped.
The below chart shows total Federal Reserve credit, which now stands at over $2 trillion, up about 150% from a couple months ago. This is money that has been partially deployed into the TARP, but I think much of it must remain with the Treasury, waiting to be deployed. Meanwhile, I’ve been reading moe about deflation, than inflation.
Here’s a link for the spreadsheet that I used to pull the data from the Fed and to create the above graph.
Or you can click to see the code
Public Function frb3(Optional indate As Date, Optional strInput As String) As Variant
‘====================================================
‘ This is a formula that pulls money supply data from the US Federal Reserve Website
‘ Sources:
‘ The historical listing is at: http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/
‘ The current report is: http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/Current/
‘
‘ The formula requires a HTML input string, as illustrated in the example.
‘ Jason Chroman
‘====================================================
Dim sURL As String
If indate = #12:00:00 AM# Then
indatestring = “current”
Else
If Month(indate) < 10 Then spacer1 = "0" Else spacer1 = ""
If Day(indate) < 10 Then spacer2 = "0" Else spacer2 = ""
indatestring = Year(indate) & spacer1 & Month(indate) & spacer2 & Day(indate)
End If
'
sURL = "http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/" & indatestring & "/h41.htm"
s1 = GetURLData(sURL)
'
strFind1 = strInput
strFind2 = "NOWRAP>”
strFind3 = “
”
len2 = Len(strFind2)
‘
j1 = InStr(1, s1, strFind1)
j2 = InStr(j1, s1, strFind2)
j3 = InStr(j1, s1, strFind3)
s2 = Mid(s1, j2 + len2, j3 - j2 - len2)
s3 = Replace(s2, “,”, “”)
s3 = Replace(s3, “ ”, “”)
frb3 = Val(s3)
‘
End Function