The Best Part of the Coronavirus Relief Bill

By John Taylor.

"As the Wall Street Journal reported and I tweeted yesterday, Senators Chuck Schumer and Patrick Toomey made important news when they agreed that with the new Coronavirus relief legislation, “the $429 billion would be revoked and the Fed wouldn’t be able to replicate identical emergency lending programs next year without congressional approval”

This is a welcome development because it is a start on the best monetary road back to a stronger economy. With the vaccines on the way and with markets functioning again, this is the time for the Fed to get back to a more rules-based monetary policy that it was moving toward before the pandemic struck.  

This favorable development owes much to the outspoken insistence and careful reasoning of Senator Toomey. He argued that the Fed’s new direct lending programs enacted earlier this year were not needed going forward, and that their very existence blurred in dangerous ways the operation of fiscal and monetary policy. As Toomey explained on Squawk Box this morning in an interview with Becky Quick, “These facilities were always intended to be temporary…. Their purpose was to restore normal functioning in the private capital and lending markets.”

He then explained that questionable interpretations of the legislation had been recently put forward raising doubts about this temporary status. So he took action, and he drafted legislative language to clarify the situation in the coronavirus relief bill. The concern was that monetary policy would become an instrument of fiscal policy to the severe detriment to good economic policy and thereby threaten a return to a strong, low-unemployment, low-inflation economy. With new legislative language, he said, “The good news is these programs will be the temporary facilities they were intended to be.”

 As an editorial in the Wall Street Journal said today: “The best provision in the bill is the limit on potential abuse by the Biden Treasury and Federal Reserve. Credit here to Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, who held firm on limiting the Fed’s maneuvering room without a new act of Congress.”

I hope this action is an important down payment on a return to a more strategic monetary policy going forward. As far as we can tell, the impetus for this change did not come from the Fed. But it is good news for the Fed that members of congress are supporting a more rules-based monetary policy, and they may even have some help next year from the Administration over at the Treasury."