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This was the old rate maintenance regime, but unfortunately you're almost 20 years out of date here. The way they implement the policy rate is by simply paying that chosen rate of interest on reserves directly. They absolutely flooded the banking system with excess reserves, in order for the interbank lending rates to get pinned to that same 'floor' rate. For those entities holding reserves which aren't legally allowed to be paid interest directly, the Fed pays them interest anyway, using overnight reverse-repos that you mentioned before.
I believe basically all central banks switched to this approach rather than OMOs with 0 excess reserves (it's way easier this way).
And with this regime, there's basically no difference to the banks whether they're holding reserves or short-term securities, so the Fed's balance sheet composition and size can be changed at will.
I can't exactly tell, but it kind of sounds like you're describing some kind of conception of banking like they're storing real objects. Like you 'deposit' some gold bars and your jewelry, and they issue you an account balance and/or a paper money receipt for it? In that kind of idea, I can see how you would be talking about the bank's assets and how they 'back' the value of the credit money. And that kind of story is like where the 'fractional reserve -> money multiplier' ideas came from.
That just has nothing to do with how modern banking actually works (nor even really past banking apparently, the goldsmith idea was basically always a misconception or story for convenience). The Fed's balance sheet assets are almost entirely just treasury securities, which they 'bought' by creating their own liabilities (reserves). It was just a pure balance sheet expansion, which is how modern banks work. Maybe the terminology here is that banks in the real world use 'finance' model of banking while some dated textbooks discuss hypothetical 'intermediation' models.
You're basically just referring to things having value for various reasons. 'Backing' means there's a subject behind it, guaranteeing a value (or trying to). It's just going to serve to confuse thinking to bring out 'backed by' when it's not an actual strong case. Does a government want their currency to be more valuable than less, like a company wants their stock price to be higher rather than lower (because look at our great cash flow this quarter)? Yeah, but those are categorically different than an IOU that promises some redemption value like gold or PS5s. Now if a company has a standing offer to buy back any existing stock at some price, that is more of a real backing.
I didn't follow this part, can you mention the crises you're referring to?
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