Bloomberg writes "Euro Crisis Makes Fed Lender of Only Resort as Funding Dries Up". The article says, "The Federal Reserve, chastised by Congress for lending money to foreign institutions such as the Central Bank of Libya, is once again the lender of last resort for banks around the world it knows little about. Three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., money-market borrowing rates for dollars are rising, leading the Fed and European Central Bank to make the currency available to Europe's institutions for as many as three months. U.S. prime money-market funds cut their exposure to euro-zone bank deposits and commercial paper, or short-term IOUs, to $214 billion in August from $391 billion at the end of last year, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. data. The failure of regulators worldwide to address European banks’ fragile dependence on short-term funding is "putting the Fed in a really awkward position," said Karen Shaw Petrou, managing partner at Federal Financial Analytics, a Washington regulatory research firm whose clients include the biggest U.S. banks. The swaps with Europe "are an extremely advantageous political football" for critics of the Fed." See also, WSJ's "For Some Companies, No Interest In Interest", which says, "A little-noticed provision of last year's financial-overhaul law gave companies something they had long wanted: a way to earn interest on large balances held in bank checking accounts. But now, with the economy weak and interest rates tumbling, many of them don't want it anymore."
