Odd Lots - Why Interest Rates on Savings Accounts Are Still So Low

Episode Date: February 23, 2023

The Federal Reserve has been raising benchmark borrowing rates at the fastest pace in decades, but the interest rate paid out to millions of people with bank accounts is still stuck at almost zero. Ac...cording to data from Bankrate, the average interest rate on savings accounts is just 0.23%. So what's going on? Why have many banks so far avoided raising what they pay out to depositors even as the Fed hikes, and will that eventually change? What does it mean for the financial system and also economic policy given that higher rates are, in theory, supposed to encourage less spending and more saving in order to curb higher inflation? On this episode, we dig deep into the making of bank deposit rates with Barclays strategist Joe Abate.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:50 of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. Joe, do you know what the average interest rate paid on U.S. bank accounts currently is? Only because we just looked it up and I couldn't believe it. I actually thought you were wrong about a decimal.
Starting point is 00:01:04 Like, I thought when you told me the number that you must be a decimal point off. Yeah, it is surprising. So the average... average annual percentage yield or APY according to bank rate is 0.23%. This at a time when, as you know, benchmark interest rates are at like 4.5%, 4.75%. I would have guessed that maybe they were like 1.5% which is still pretty low, right? So if you could get 4.5% as a bank, an overnight rate, and then it's like, okay, maybe you're saving your depositors checking account.
Starting point is 00:01:41 whatever, get a couple percent. That's still a spread, but they're still basically paying you nothing. Almost nothing. You just want to like hold your cash there, which is pretty staggering. Absolutely. So this is a question that comes up a lot. And it's obviously frustrating if you are a saver. You know, it's very, everyone wants to be a rentier to it to some extent, right? I want to make money on our money. Exactly. That is the dream. So if the banks aren't passing through those interest rate hikes, it's naturally frustrating for retail depositors. However, it's also kind of frustrating from an economic slash macroeconomic policy perspective, because if you think about what monetary policy is supposed to do,
Starting point is 00:02:21 it is supposed to work through changes in interest rates, which are supposed to ripple out from the central bank into the rest of the economy. Right. Intuitively, like, one channel that you could imagine that rate hikes work through is, oh, look, suddenly I'm getting a lot more money to save or getting more. maybe I'll at the margin, I'll save a little more because I'm getting paid to, spend a little less, sort of decreased pressure in the economy. I don't know if anyone ever really thinks that way.
Starting point is 00:02:50 It's like, oh, I'm not going to buy like this watch or I'm not going to buy these like concert tickets because I could get, you know, 3% having left this money in the bank. Nonetheless. We can get 0.23%. Yeah, I'm definitely going to, okay, I'm definitely going to keep spending in that case. And of course there are ways to like get more yield and you can lock it up. But if you wanted to, you could go out and, like, buy a one-year bill. Certificate of deposit.
Starting point is 00:03:14 I'm not going to do that, you know. You're not, okay. It's so much to work. Okay. Well, this is clearly something that we need to talk about, both in the context of monetary policy and broader economics. And I am very pleased to say that we really do have the perfect guest on this topic. We're going to be speaking with Joe Abate. He is a money market strategist over at Barclays.
Starting point is 00:03:34 Also does fixed income research. I've been a fan of his work for a very long time and have been. meaning to get him on all thoughts for just as long. So I'm very pleased to have him here now to explain this discrepancy to us. Joe, welcome to the show. Thank you. Nice to hear. Are those numbers right? Yes and no. I think the fundamental problem with bank deposit rates is that there's so many different types of deposits. And because there's so many types of deposits, it's hard to kind of come up with one comparable interest rate across all banks and across all forms, right? So you have deposits, time deposits, for example, CDs that you just mentioned.
Starting point is 00:04:22 You've got checking account rates, if they pay interest at all. And then you've got, you know, different balance requirements for different types of customers and things like that. So coming up with an explicit one-size-fits-all bank deposit rate is different. difficult. But the phenomena that you're describing where bank deposit rates in a rising rate environment go up like a feather and in a interest rate cutting environment where the Fed is easing policy, they sink like a stone. That's been a phenomenon for decades. Well, let's get into that then. So, you know, the Fed hikes rates on a Wednesday. Why doesn't that just automatically translate to a bunch of banks emailing savers and saying,
Starting point is 00:05:08 deposit rate is going up. And I know there are a couple that do seem to automatically raise saving rates, but it's not the norm. Well, the question boils down to kind of what does the bank need, right, in terms of financing, right? So most of its funding comes from deposits. And banks have a fair amount of pricing power when it comes to deposits, right? There are not many substitutes for bank deposits out there. You might try a money market fund, for example, or you might try, you know, bills or like some of the things that you were talking about, but you're not going to get the same level of liquidity, for example, with deposit insurance, that you might with a bank deposit. And so if you're not faced with a lot of competition,
Starting point is 00:06:00 and I'm talking about industry-wide, then deposit rates don't necessarily have to go up lockstep with the increase in the Fed funds rate. So to your point, you know, it's not terribly surprising that deposit rates don't go up immediately when the Fed raises rates. Now, I will say that they do go up and the real issue is not so much the level of rates,
Starting point is 00:06:30 but the speed with which they go up, right? And that becomes a question of what people call the deposit data, right, which is how much of the monetary policy rate or the change in the Fed Funds rate actually gets passed on to depositors. And what happens is that initially in the tightening cycle, banks are over-deposited. And as those deposits migrate into higher-yielding products, and they lose financing, they start to compete more aggressively with each other.
Starting point is 00:07:05 And they start to try to poach deposits from one institution to the next. And what you see is with subsequent rate hikes, the deposit data, right, goes up. And so what you normally find is that in the last tightening cycle, for example, the pass-through effect was only about 35 to 40 percent of the Fed's rate hikes made it into bank deposit rates. over the entire cycle. But if you started at the cycle, it was down around 10%. And by the end of the cycle, it was closer to 75 or 80%. And that has happened pretty much every interest rate cycle going back decades,
Starting point is 00:07:44 which is start low and high, but that the overall deposit data for the cycle is somewhere around 30 to 40% of the Fed's ratings. And again, this is a competitive dynamic, right? There's not a lot of substitutes for deposits out there, right, that offer the same level of deposit insurance or protection and liquidity. Then, you know, banks have a significant degree of pricing power when it comes to deposits. So, Joe, just on that note, this idea that eventually deposit rates do go up as the competitive process between banks kind of kicks in. One piece of interesting research that I saw from the New York Fed is this idea that deposit betas, so the relationship between, you know, benchmark rates and what banks are actually
Starting point is 00:08:33 paying savers, that they have been trending lower in later interest rate cycles. So the beta now is lower than it was in, say, like the early 2000s hiking cycle. It's lower than it was in sort of the most recent hiking cycle as well. What accounts for that? You know, if I had to speculate, I'd say that there's probably two things that may account for it. One is that QE has kind of changed to the dynamics so that banks, you know, at the beginning of a tightening cycle, are significantly more over-deposited than they were in past tightening cycles. And that might account for why deposit betas are lower because banks have a thicker cushion of deposits
Starting point is 00:09:17 and therefore they don't have to compete as readily as they did or as quickly as they did back in, you know, earlier tightening cycles. The second thing, which I think doesn't get as much attention, right, is the fact that I think banks increasingly, especially the larger domestic institutions, are not competing specifically on explicit interest. And I think what happens is that banks are able to pay people, especially institutions, with, services. And rather than compete on interest rate, they compete on price services. So they may offer discounts, volume discounts if you want to think about it. And that dynamic where you've got competition occurring through kind of a non-price mechanism, i.e. a non-interest price mechanism may alter how betas perform in the tightening cycles.
Starting point is 00:10:18 So I think that's probably, I think those are probably the two main reasons why deposit betas are not as high as they were in previous cycles. So could factors like the quality of an online app, the size of the network, the ease of the website, the interconnectedness of a big bank's website with payment apps like Zell and other things like that, like could these essentially be selling points where just bank X? I won't name any specific banks because I don't know the details. Bank X says, look, we have this great app. We have this great integration with all these things.
Starting point is 00:10:56 Are you really going to move your, you know, $8,000 checking account over to Y for one extra bank Y for one extra percent? It's going to be like, you know, $15 extra a year and all the hassle details. Yes. I think that I think that's exactly right. I would also say that there's a time tax involved too, right, which is kind of the corollary of this, which is that your paycheck is linked directly to your checking account. And, you know, migrating it to a different bank requires, you know, kind of contacting HR
Starting point is 00:11:33 or probably filling out online forms at your office to kind of change the direction. And that's a hassle. And I think the hassle effect is probably what keeps deposits sticky, as well as the service effect that you mentioned, right? The non-price services. I would suspect that the effect is actually bigger for institutional deposits than it is for retail depositors, right? That institutions obviously would face much bigger costs switching banks, in addition to other non-price. services, which might include investment banking advice or things along that nature, that make deposits a little bit more sticky at the institutional level, as well as at the retail level.
Starting point is 00:12:23 So it's not just retail, but also institutions. Right. If you're a treasurer for a large company, I can imagine that there's a whole process to changing your preferred bank. Right. You know, Tracy and our producer, Dash, I'm not going to say which one, but they're both customers of a certain large banks, FinTech Arm, and they're also talking about, always talking about the juicy interest rates. They're getting on their checking accounts, but it does seem
Starting point is 00:12:49 like kind of a hassle. And so, yes, it is more money, but I don't really like want to deal with it. What, you know, when we talk about competition, what about sort of like classical ideas about market structure in terms of the number of banks, the size of the banks, the rise of like a handful of these mega national banks. And does that play any role in the sort of decline in deposit betas over time? You know, I'm not an industry analyst at that level. You know, we do have a lot of banks in the U.S., and there is definitely a convenience factor to location.
Starting point is 00:13:31 So hard to know how that plays out, least in my mind, in terms of deposit concentration. But deposits are definitely concentrated in the U.S. at the largest banks. I will say that. Now, again, is that because of the stickiness of those banks or the convenience or their online services or their network effects? I suspect it's a variety of everything. So one thing I wanted to ask is, you know, the way sort of retail deposits are supposed to work is you give the bank money. They pay you some interest. And the interest is coming from, I guess, the array of central bank facilities nowadays, but also from the bank taking your money and lending it out into the wider economy. So to what degree are bank deposit rates also a
Starting point is 00:14:36 function of the lending or investment opportunities that banks see in the market? The primary driver is going to be asset growth on the bank side, right? That determines how competitive banks have to be in deposits. And so if you think about the bank's balance sheet, on the asset side, it's got essentially three types of assets. It's got loans. It's got cash that it has to maintain for regulatory purposes at the Federal Reserve, and it's got securities holdings, right?
Starting point is 00:15:03 On the liability side, most of its funding comes in the form of deposits of some kind. And there's an advantage to deposits, especially retail deposits, because, as you said, they are pretty sticky, right? And the stickiness is partly a function of the services, but it's also a function of government guaranteed deposit insurance as well. In addition to that, there's wholesale funding that they can rely on. Now, whether that's commercial paper or term financing, corporate debt, et cetera. these are all supplemental forms of funding that they can rely on to amp up their funding as asset growth, you know, as assets grow. And so from banks' perspective, it's got to figure out, and it's got to balance on the asset side, the interest returns on its earning versus interest costs of raising more deposits or raising more wholesale funding. And that balancing act is really the way monetary policy is expected to unfold, right?
Starting point is 00:16:08 Monetary policies expected to kind of influence that dynamic. The asset side of the balance sheet determines how you decide to fund it, whether you're using deposits, which are probably the cheapest, stickiest form of funding, or whether you're using wholesale funding, right, which is a little bit more expensive, more flight prone, but, you know, depending on your size may be easier to raise because you've more market access than, say, a smaller institution. So it becomes kind of a question of, or at least monetary policy, becomes a question of how do banks triage between their asset growth, deposit, the loans, securities, and cash versus their liability side deposits and wholesale funding for its
Starting point is 00:16:56 commercial paper, corporate bonds, other, you know, kind of, term financing that's available out there. And that kind of balancing is the way monetary policy is supposed to affect bank lending decisions and the transmission of the Fed's interest rate changes. Can you talk a little bit more about how retail deposits as a source of funding, their role in 2023 or 2022 or whatever, versus the past? What is the, what, like, how would, you know, if we were having this conversation in the 90s or early 2000s, what is the role of retail deposits as a source of funding then versus today? Why has it changed?
Starting point is 00:17:38 Yeah. So what I would say is that retail deposits have actually become more important over time because of regulatory changes. So if you recall back before the financial crisis, one of the things that was happening was that banks were increasingly reliant on wholesale funding. and they went to wholesale funding because it was cheap and it was readily available. But the result of that wholesale funding reliance was that a lot of their funding became very, very rate sensitive and very rate or rather very flight prone. And you can imagine an extreme situation where you're financing, let's say, 30-year mortgages and you're financing them on an overnight basis in the repo market.
Starting point is 00:18:23 you have a significant maturity mismatch, right, where if that repo funding can't be rolled, you lose your source of financing for those mortgages. And so one of the consequences of the financial crisis, when we saw that funding was as light-prone as it was, particularly in these markets, regulators kind of emphasize the need for banks to A hold more liquidity, whether it's hold higher cash balances at the Fed, right and simultaneously rely more heavily on wholesale on retail funding that is deposit based funding and so what we've seen over the last really 20 years or so is a decline in the ratio of repo funding CP market funding you know kind of these financial instruments of short maturities
Starting point is 00:19:14 that were financing asset growth you know before 2006 and those have been replaced by more deposit funded. Now, as I said earlier, initially that would be reflected in higher deposit rates. Of course, QE at the time, that suppressed deposit rates. And if you recall that before 2012, right, we had unlimited deposit insurance on transaction account accounts for a while, right, in order to kind of keep funding stable for banks. What's happened since then, right, is as interest rates go up. As I said earlier, banks have been able to compete on non-price or non-interest rate services more, and the deposits have kind of remained sticky. So you have this kind of wholesale shift away from, you know, kind of wholesale funding to retail deposits. And if you want to go back
Starting point is 00:20:03 even further, this looks more akin to an environment that kind of existed, you know, prior to the 1980s, right, to an environment where banks were much more deposit-reliant. and much less relying on financial products. And if you look back, you know, further, this is kind of really beckons to an era of, you know, kind of pre-interest rate decontrol before 1980. But again, that's going back a lot of many, many, many years now. Right.
Starting point is 00:20:37 So deposits are more important as a source of bank funding, thanks to the experience of the financial crisis and post-GFC regulation. And at the same time, because we've had things like QE, a lot of banks are simply swimming in deposits to the extent that they kind of have more than they perhaps need, which means that they are willing to allow depositors to maybe look elsewhere for better rates.
Starting point is 00:21:08 They are. However, some banks are losing deposits faster than other banks. Yes. I wanted you to bring this up. This is the small bank versus large bank deposit experience. And also this dovetails with a previous episode on discount lending, the discount window. I'm sorry.
Starting point is 00:21:28 I missed that discount window lending piece. But I think you're exactly right here, which is that the level of deposits and the level of bank reserves in the system, that is the cash and the liquidity. circulating in the system is important, but so too is the distribution of those balances across institutions. And what we're seeing is that unlike QT or quantitative tightening in 2017, the deposits are leaving, right, or at least the cash is leaving small banks faster than it's leaving the large banks. And so that the smaller banks are forced to compete more aggressively, in deposit markets than say they're larger banks. Now, part of this is a reflection of the fact that when QT occurred, right,
Starting point is 00:22:24 deposit balance is migrated to the largest institutions out there, again, because deposits are heavily concentrated. And so those banks tended to be more over-deposited, relatively speaking, than the smaller institutions, so that when the Fed is draining reserves and shrinking its balance sheet, the people that have less liquidity to start off with because they had less fewer deposits, those are the institutions that are experiencing more deposit rate pressure. How do the small banks even compete? I mean, I guess, right, as you say, but like, is this, like, going to be a permanent
Starting point is 00:23:00 condition of banking this struggle that the small banks have for deposits relative to these high, high networked, large national banks? Again, you know, small banks would argue that there are, you know, advantages to banking locally. Okay. And that the advantages to banking locally is, you know, your mortgage lender knows the market, right, knows the housing market in your area. Your commercial banker knows your business, knows your, knows you personally, et cetera. And so there's, you know, so I wouldn't say that it's inevitable that all deposits will migrate to large institutions and large institutions will, you know, be selective in paying deposit rates. I still think that there's enough competition between large and small banks, right, that, you know, small banks are not going away at all.
Starting point is 00:24:01 But again, this deposit competition that we're experiencing right now is the aftershock of quantitative easing, right? quantitative easing and the buying of treasury securities and mortgages, again, ended up putting a lot of deposits into the system as a whole, but those deposits tended to pile up faster at the larger institutions than smaller institutions. So just on that note, and you already touched on this, but can you dig in a little bit more into what QT or quantitative tightening actually means for, I guess, the effectiveness of monetary policy? Is it, does it like, mechanically ramp up that competition for depositors, or does it maybe encourage some sort of substitution effect where, you know, banks can, I don't know, replace bank deposits with rate
Starting point is 00:24:53 sensitive treasuries or something like that? That's, again, an important distinction. And I think what you have to look at here is the demand curve for bank reserves, right? This is the liquidity that's in the system created from QE, right, and from the asset side of the Fed's balance sheet. And these reserves are used to mean intraday requirements for settling payments, as well as liquidity requirements for regulatory purposes that banks are required to maintain. And as the Fed lets the assets on its balance sheet roll off, right, and doesn't replace them so that its balance sheet shrinks, bank reserves go down. And the decline in bank reserves is what forces banks, right, ultimately to compete more aggressively in deposit markets because they need to restore that cash position on their balance sheet.
Starting point is 00:25:51 In addition to the fact that their assets growing, right, they're making loans. We need to replace that funding. The extent to which QT creates reserve pressure, right, is what creates the pressure on the Fed funds rate, right? the Fed's policy instrument and determines ultimately where the Fed funds rate trades within its target band right so what the Fed wants to do is if you think about the demand curve demand curve is probably for bank reserves is probably i'm going to get this wrong concave shaped right so it kind of caves in in the middle and when you get to the upper part of the the demand curve, right, you're in the steep slope. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:26:38 And what the steep slope of that demand curve means is that changes in the level of bank reserves create significant changes in interest rates. And the goal, right, from the Fed's perspective, is merely to shift the supply of bank reserves so that it's in the gently sloping part of the demand curve, right? That the level of bank reserves is ample, right, but not abundant. and ample means that it's not scarce, right, so that the level of the Fed funds rate relative to other market rates or within the band, right, it's comfortably in the middle, right? Remember, the Fed is targeting a 25 basis point band between the top and the bottom on the Fed funds rate. And the goal is to kind of keep the Fed funds rate, you know, within the midpoint, let's say, of that ban, right, or close to that midpoint.
Starting point is 00:27:30 So, again, you want to stay away from the steep part of the demand curve. But it's the same respect, right? Unless you're, you know, substantially easing policy and you've pushed rates to zero, you also want to stay away from the super flat part of the demand curve, right? Where you've got bank reserves and excess of $4 trillion. Interest rates are totally unresponsive to the level of liquidity in the system because you've effectively driven rates to zero, right? So again, that's kind of a long-winded way of describing what the goal of QT is, right?
Starting point is 00:28:04 enough pressure on interest rates, but not too much. Do you have an estimate for how small the Fed is going to shrink its balance sheet ultimately? So this is pretty complicated, and I think you have to be pretty humble about this. We should ask what the level of ample excess reserves is to, just to get all the loaded questions out there. All right. So my sense is that the level of ample reserves, is probably around $2.7 trillion. But I'm a little bit cautious about that
Starting point is 00:28:53 because I think the level of reserves is less important than the ratio of reserve balances is to the total asset that banks have. So that if you look at 2019, when we saw that bank reserves got too thin, we saw that going back to our demand curve, right the ratio of bank cash assets to total assets shrank below 8%. So the 8% mark is kind of the threshold that divides ample from scarce.
Starting point is 00:29:30 And so my sense is you want to keep bank reserves in terms of ample around 8% or higher, right? At the moment, they're around 9%. If you break that number down between domestic, banks, small banks, right? You see a very different picture, right? Domestic banks, that ratio is around 10.5%. And they're probably still two percentage points or more away from that 2019 level where they were scarce.
Starting point is 00:30:01 If you look at small banks, they're around 6% of the sense. And that's much closer to where they were in 2019. So as we were talking about before, you know, ample, right? In an aggregate sense, you would definitely say that bank reserves are ample. But in a relative sense, in terms of the distribution between large and small banks, it's not clear that there's as much ampleness of bank reserves than the numbers suggest. I just have one more question, which is, you know, in the interests of, I guess, both financial stability and the effective transmission of monetary policy and fighting inflation,
Starting point is 00:30:44 Should we all be going out and finding the best deposit deals for ourselves? Should we all be moving our money around? Is this helpful? Yeah. I mean, everybody wants to earn more money. So I would expect that people would migrate their balances to higher yielding products. And the closest substitute for bank deposit at this point is a money market fund. And the curious thing is that money market funds,
Starting point is 00:31:14 are not experiencing inflows, right? So money market fund balances are paying about 4% or more in terms of seven-day yields, right? So you can definitely earn more than the 23 basis points you mentioned, right, in a government-only money market fund. And what's puzzling, at least to me, is that given that difference between what you can earn in a money market fund and a bank deposit, right?
Starting point is 00:31:42 Why aren't money fund balances going up? Why aren't they significantly higher than they are right now? And I suspect, right, that there are two reasons for this, right? One is that on the retail side, we are seeing some level of interest rate sensitivity, but people are moving into higher yielding products than government-only money market funds. And in fact, what they're doing is they're moving into prime money market funds. And the prime money market funds won't go into this. sort of the details, but they buy commercial paper and other credit instruments, right,
Starting point is 00:32:20 all short maturity, but they earn a little bit more than a government-only market fund. And so if you're an interest rate sensitive investor, right, and you're looking for higher yields, you're going to migrate into the prime funds. And what we've seen is prime fund balances have gone up sharply in the last, or at least since liftoff. When you look at institutional investors, I think what institutional investors are doing as they're buying bills, right? They're looking at bill yields and saying bill yields are significantly higher than what I can get on a money market fund, right? And so I'm going to buy bills rather than invest in the money market fund because they can earn higher yields. What I do not think is true is that I do not believe that multiple years of quantitative easing have somehow suppressed interest rate sensitivity among investors so that they no longer care.
Starting point is 00:33:11 about 4% yields in money market funds and it will be happy to earn 23 basis points in a bank deposit and not move. I suspect, and we are seeing this, as money is coming out of deposits, but it's migrating into higher yielding stuff and not necessarily governmentally money market funds, at least for now. Okay. Joe, that was a fantastic explanation of how this all works. Thank you so much for coming on Oblots. You fulfilled a long-held dream. of mind to get you on the show. So thank you so much. All right. Thank you. Bye now. So, Joe, I thought that was not just an interesting walk through the question at hand, which is why aren't banks raising deposit rates, but also kind of a really nice overview of how the monetary policy
Starting point is 00:34:10 interaction with the financial system has actually changed since the 2008 financial crisis. No, I mean, I was like really interested in like that sort of headline question, why don't they raise rates. But also, like, I was just sort of curious, like, how do banks work? You know, like, what is the, no, seriously, like, what is the role of deposits? No, now you're like, why isn't more money flowing into government money market funds? Well, yeah. I mean, seriously. But I mean, all these things, like, over time, like the policy changes that were made, you know, post-grade financial crisis that sort of put this premium on deposits. You know, there's this stat that I've seen and heard that, like, you're more likely to get divorced.
Starting point is 00:34:50 worst than to ever change banks in your life. Really? Yeah. And so what I've heard, and I don't know if it's true, although you know who knows is our frequent guest, Patrick McKenzie, has written about this. But why do banks still have these physical? Yeah. Because if they could just, I've heard that if they could just get like a few people in the
Starting point is 00:35:07 door, you're worth so much money over the course of the lifetime as a customer. Yeah. Even though no one goes into those retail things. And it's partly because no one never really switched banks. I think it is like a phenomenally sticky business model. And I remember when I went to university in London, I remember banks pitching these student programs. And if I was still in London, I think I would still be with the bank that, like, recruited me when I was a college student. It's weird because I think like intuitively you'd think with the internet that moving money from one account to another would be more liquid and more easy.
Starting point is 00:35:41 But somehow it seems like the opposite because you have all these apps and you have passwords and you have bills connected to your account. And so if I'm going to change your banks, like that's so many things to switch, it's just not worth it. The network effect. Yeah. The same thing that maintains dollar dominance. And Twitter dominance and Facebook dominance, even though it's all, it's network effects all the way down. So the two other things I thought were really interesting just very quickly are that idea of reserve scarcity. And this is something that came up with Bill Nelson when we were talking about why have we seen this tick up in discount lending to the banks.
Starting point is 00:36:17 Yeah. This idea that even though we still have a lot of reserves and liquidity in the system, they are not evenly distributed. Yeah. And then secondly, this idea that as quantitative tightening really kicks into gear, you might start to get this process where deposit rates start going higher and there is that substitution effect. Yeah. And the fact that like you can't actually or you're the you're only going to go get so far taking a crude measure of cash to total assets because of this. very different than model between the big domestic banks and the small banks and how they may the smaller banks might run into liquidity, scarcity a lot faster than the larger banks. So, you know, can see why analysts like Joe are in demand because it's not as simple as just sort of like
Starting point is 00:37:04 looking at one number and dividing by another number. Totally. Banking is not a monolith. And also, everyone should go deposit rate shopping in order to, A, make more money and improve the monetary policy mechanism. Both the worst at inflation, we'll all be getting more income and more income. It's the last thing that we all need right now. If I had, if I was in that fintech, you guys are and I'd be spending that money. Okay, we're back to the circular nature of like prices going down and then increasing prices and then we never get out of it.
Starting point is 00:37:34 Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Armin and Dash Bennett at DashBot.
Starting point is 00:37:51 And check out all of our podcasts here at Bloomberg under the handle at Podcasts. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odlots, where we blog, we post transcripts, and we have a weekly newsletter. Comes out every Friday. Go there and sign up. Thanks for listening.

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