Hamilton on the Term Deposit Facility

Excerpts (full post here):

We sometimes describe fiscal policy as determining the overall level of the public debt, while monetary policy determines the composition of that debt between money and interest-bearing federal obligations. By that definition, the Fed has clearly now entered the realm of implementing fiscal policy, by issuing debt directly in the form of interest-bearing reserves, reverse repos, and now term deposits.
The Fed would no doubt argue that it is doing so wisely, and that the decision to absorb Fannie and Freddie's debt and mortgage guarantees into the fiscal liabilities of the U.S. government has already been made by Congress and the President. The Fed is simply taking that reality as given and trying to minimize collateral damage.
Or one might see it this way: political pressures had been the cause of the quasi-nationalization and then de facto nationalization of mortgage debt in the first place, and the Fed found itself inextricably drawn into the mess. There is now political pressure to inflate the debt away, from which pressure the Fed nevertheless sees itself as immune.