The reserve requirement (or cash reserve ratio) is a central bank regulation employed by most, but not all, of the world's central banks, that sets the minimum amount of reserves that must be held by a commercial bank. The minimum reserve is generally determined by the central bank to be no less than a specified percentage of the amount of deposit liabilities the commercial bank owes to its customers. The commercial bank's reserves normally consist of cash owned by the bank and stored physically in the bank vault (vault cash), plus the amount of the commercial bank's balance in that bank's account with the central bank.
The required reserve ratio is sometimes used as a tool in monetary policy, influencing the country's borrowing and interest rates by changing the amount of funds available for banks to make loans with. Western central banks rarely increase the reserve requirements because it would cause immediate liquidity problems for banks with low excess reserves; they generally prefer to use open market operations (buying and selling government-issued bonds) to implement their monetary policy. The People's Bank of China uses changes in reserve requirements as an inflation-fighting tool, and raised the reserve requirement ten times in 2007 and eleven times since the beginning of 2010.
An institution that holds reserves in excess of the required amount is said to hold excess reserves.
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Effects on money supply
The conventional view
The theory that a reserve requirement can be used as a tool of monetary policy is frequently found in economics textbooks. Under the theory, higher the reserve requirement is set, the less funds banks will have to loan out , leading to lower money creation and perhaps to higher purchasing power of the money previously in use. Under this view, the effect is multiplied, because money obtained as loan proceeds can be re-deposited, and a portion of those deposits may again be loaned out, and so on. Under this theory, the effect on the money supply is governed by the following formulas:
where notationally,
However, in the United States (and other countries except Brazil, China, India, Russia), the reserve requirements are generally not frequently altered to implement monetary policy because of the short-term disruptive effect on financial markets.
The endogenous money view
Some economists dispute the conventional theory of the reserve requirement. Criticisms of the conventional theory are usually associated with theories of endogenous money.
Jaromir Benes and Michael Kumhof of the IMF Research Department report that the "deposit multiplier" of the undergraduate economics textbook, where monetary aggregates are created at the initiative of the central bank, through an initial injection of high-powered money into the banking system that gets multiplied through bank lending, turns the actual operation of the monetary transmission mechanism on its head. Benes and Kumhof assert that in most cases where banks ask for replenishment of depleted reserves, the central bank obliges. Under this view, reserves therefore impose no constraints, as the deposit multiplier is simply, in the words of Kydland and Prescott (1990), a myth. Under this theory, private banks almost fully control the money creation process.
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Required reserves
United States
In the United States, a reserve requirement (or liquidity ratio) is a minimum value, set by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, of the ratio of required reserves to a category of deposit liabilities (called the "Net Transaction Accounts" or "NTAs") owed by depository institutions to their customers (e.g., owed by commercial banks including U.S. branches of a foreign bank, savings and loan association, savings bank, credit union). The deposit liability categories currently subject to reserve requirements are mainly checking accounts. There is no reserve requirement on savings accounts and time deposit accounts owned by individuals. The total amount of all NTAs held by customers with U.S. depository institutions, plus the U.S. paper currency and coin currency held by the nonbank public, is called M1.
A depository institution can satisfy its reserve requirements by holding either vault cash or reserve deposits. An institution that is a member of the Federal Reserve System must hold its reserve deposits at a Federal Reserve Bank. Nonmember institutions can elect to hold their reserve deposits at a member institution on a pass-through basis.
A depository institution's reserve requirements vary by the dollar amount of NTAs held by customers of that institution. Effective November 17, 2015, institutions with net transactions accounts:
- Of less than $15.2 million have no minimum reserve requirement;
- Between $15.2 million and $110.2 million must have a liquidity ratio of 3% of NTAs;
- Exceeding $110.2 million must have a liquidity ratio of 10% of NTAs.
The threshold monetary amounts are recalculated annually according to a statutory formula.
Effective 27 December 1990, a liquidity ratio of zero has applied to CDs and time deposits, owned by entities other than households, and the Eurocurrency liabilities of depository institutions. Deposits owned by foreign corporations or governments are currently not subject to reserve requirements.
When an institution fails to satisfy its reserve requirements, it can make up its deficiency with reserves borrowed from a Federal Reserve Bank or from an institution holding reserves in excess of reserve requirements. Such loans are typically due in 24 hours or less.
An institution's overnight reserves, averaged over some maintenance period, must equal or exceed its average required reserves, calculated over the same maintenance period. If this calculation is satisfied, there is no requirement that reserves be held at any point in time. Hence reserve requirements play only a limited role in money creation in the United States. Since quantitative easing began in 2008, they have been even less important, as an enormous glut of excess reserves now exists (over the whole system, though in theory, individual banks may still run into temporary shortfalls).
The International Banking Act of 1978 requires branches of foreign banks operating in the United States to follow the same required reserve ratio standards.
Countries without reserve requirements
Canada, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden and Hong Kong have no reserve requirements.
This does not mean that banks can - even in theory - create money without limit. On the contrary, banks are constrained by capital requirements, which are arguably more important than reserve requirements even in countries that have reserve requirements.
It also does not mean that a commercial bank's overnight reserves can become negative, in these countries. The central bank will always step in to lend the necessary reserves if necessary so that this does not happen; this is sometimes described as "defending the payment system". Historically a central bank might once have run out of reserves to lend and so have had to suspend redemptions, but this can no longer happen to modern central banks because of the end of the gold standard worldwide, which means that all nations use a fiat currency.
A zero reserve requirement cannot be explained by a theory that holds that monetary policy works by varying the quantity of money using the reserve requirement.
Even in the United States, which retains formal (though now mostly irrelevant) reserve requirements, the notion of controlling the money supply by targeting the quantity of base money fell out of favor many years ago, and now the pragmatic explanation of monetary policy refers to targeting the interest rate to control the broad money supply.
United Kingdom
In the UK the term clearing banks is sometimes used, meaning banks that have direct access to the clearing system. However, for the purposes of clarity, the term commercial banks will be used for the remainder of this section.
The Bank of England, which is the central bank for the entire United Kingdom, previously held to a voluntary reserve ratio system, with no minimum reserve requirement set. In theory this meant that commercial banks could retain zero reserves. The average cash reserve ratio across the entire United Kingdom banking system, though, was higher during that period, at about 0.15% as of 1999.
From 1971 to 1980, the commercial banks all agreed to a reserve ratio of 1.5%. In 1981 this requirement was abolished.
From 1981 to 2009, each commercial bank set out its own monthly voluntary reserve target in a contract with the Bank of England. Both shortfalls and excesses of reserves relative to the commercial bank's own target over an averaging period of one day would result in a charge, incentivising the commercial bank to stay near its target, a system known as reserves averaging.
Upon the parallel introduction of quantitative easing and interest on excess reserves in 2009, banks were no longer required to set out a target, and so were no longer penalised for holding excess reserves; indeed, they were proportionally compensated for holding all their reserves at the Bank Rate (the Bank of England now uses the same interest rate for its bank rate, its deposit rate and its interest rate target). In the absence of an agreed target, the concept of excess reserves does not really apply to the Bank of England any longer, so it is technically incorrect to call its new policy "interest on excess reserves".
Canada
Canada abolished its reserve requirement in 1992.
Other countries
Other countries have required reserve ratios (or RRRs) that are statutorily enforced:
Historical changes in reserve ratios
In some countries, the cash reserve ratios have decreased over time; in some countries they have increased:
(Ratios are expressed in percentage points.)
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