US treasury sits on $1.46tn of unused funds
And it is forecast to reach $2.6 trillion in the next year. The cash does not do anything for the troubled American economy, say leading analysts, who have called for the bounty to be freed up to create jobs and spark lending. Instead, it sits in Fed chairman Ben Bernanke’s vault earning banks a miserable rate of return of 0.25%.
This massive rainy day fund, started in 2010 as a way for banks to have a pool of assets to tap should they have liquidity problems, has now become a deluge. The accounts at the Fed are now two times larger than the original $700 billion required by then Treasury chief Hank Paulson in 2008.
