Aggregate Liquidity Management

It has been largely acknowledged that monetary policy can affect borrowers and lenders differently. This paper investigates whether the distributional effects of monetary policy are an inherent feature of monetary economies with private credit instruments. In our framework, both money and credit instruments can potentially be used as media of exchange to overcome trading frictions in decentralized markets. Entrepreneurs have access to productive projects but face credit constraints due to limited pledgeability of their returns. Monetary policy affects the liquidity premium on private credit and thereby influences the cost of borrowing and the level of investment, but any attempt to ease borrowing constraints results in suboptimal decentralized-market trading activity. We show that this policy trade-off is not an inherent feature of monetary economies with private credit instruments. If we consider a richer set of aggregate liquidity management instruments, such as the payment of interest on inside money and capital requirements, it is possible to implement an efficient allocation