South African Reserve Bank Quantitative Easing aka QE

On October 11, 2012, in Uncategorized, by Chris Becker

For those who don’t see it at the Mises SA Blog, I loaded some charts of the Rand monetary base, which is by definition newly printed money, and also a chart of the asset side of the Reserve Bank’s balance sheet, which by definition is quantitative easing. Regarding the monetary base, I wrote:

Since 2000, the SARB has printed R120 billion worth of new base money.

Of this, R53 billion are newly printed notes and coin circulating with the public, and R67 billion is held by the banks in the form of required and excess reserves, i.e. the monetary base.

It is the monetary base that the banks drool over, because when the SARB supplies banks with this type of money, the banks can create roughly 34 times that in new loans, which of course is extremely profitable.

The following is a graph of the monetary base going back to 1993.

And regarding the SARB’s balance sheet, I wrote:

And for those who like a visual of the growth of the SARB’s balance sheet, here it is.

This is the composition of the asset side of the SARB’s balance sheet since 1998.

Note the large green portion is mainly cr@p, i.e. US dollars.

2 Responses to “South African Reserve Bank Quantitative Easing aka QE”

Response to Business Day “Central banks now only have ‘confidence fairy’ left” | Sound Money SA says:

January 22, 2013 at 9:23 am

[...] by borrowing and spending the world out of the current crisis. Or by flooding the market with new ‘liquidity’ aka freshly ‘printed’ bills rolled of the digital zeroes and [...]
Kyle Bass breaks the current macro-finance situation down in 6 minutes says:

February 1, 2013 at 11:41 pm

[...] – The ongoing and escalating money-printing (or balance sheet expansion): South African Reserve Bank Quantitative Easing aka QE [...]