Magazine : Archives : 2nd Quarter 2023

Banking’s New Funding Challenge

Bankers like stability and predictability in the same way that sailors hope for fair winds and following seas. Unfortunately, the economic climate has been neither stable nor predictable since June 2022, when the Federal Reserve began to aggressively raise interest rates in an attempt to bring runaway inflation to heel. The Fed began with a modest hike in the federal funds rate of just 25 basis points in March of last year. The federal funds rate is what banks charge one another on overnight loans of reserves they keep on deposit at the Federal Reserve and is principally how the...