English: Cloze Test for Upcoming Exams – Set 135

Directions: In the passage given below there are 10 blanks. Every blank has four alternative words given in options (A),(B),(C), and (D). You have to tell which word is APPROPRIATE according to the context. If all are appropriate then mark your answer as “E”.

HOW much money should exist? The Federal Reserve must soon confront this deep question. The Fed has signalled that towards the end of 2017 it will probably begin to ____1____ quantitative easing (QE), the purchase of financial assets using newly created bank reserves. The central bank’s balance-sheet ____2____ from about $900bn on the eve of the financial crisis to about $4.5trn by 2015 as it bought mortgage-backed securities and government debt. If and when the Fed shrinks its balance-sheet, it will also retire the new money it created.
Economists such as Milton Friedman popularised the study of the quantity of money in the 1960s and 1970s. By the financial crisis, however, the subject had gone out of fashion. The interest rate, it was agreed, was what mattered for the economy. The Fed varied the supply of bank reserves, but only to keep rates in the market for interbank loans where it wanted them to be.
The Fed’s injection of emergency liquidity into financial markets in 2008, however, sent interest rates ____3____. To regain control, it started paying interest on excess reserves (ie, those reserves in excess of those required by regulation). Because banks should not lend for less than what the Fed offers, the new policy set a floor under rates in the interbank market. This held even as the Fed created still more liquidity with QE.
The new system means the Fed can vary the amount of money—for example, to provide emergency liquidity—without worrying about the effect on interest rates. Maintaining the set-up, as the Fed has hinted it might, means keeping banks ____4____ with reserves. Ricardo Reis of the London School of Economics estimates that doing so currently requires about $1trn of reserves. Add Mr Reis’s estimate to the roughly $1.5trn of currency now in circulation and you get a minimum balance-sheet size of $2.5trn, much greater than before the crisis. And that is before you consider the benefits of having still more money available.
In 1969 Friedman pointed out that holding money is costly. It means forgoing the risk-free return an investor can make by buying government bonds. Yet because people need money for transactions, everyone must pay this cost (deposits in current accounts rarely earn as much as bonds). Only if the return on money is somehow made equal to that of bonds does the inefficiency ____5____. One way of making this happen is to create deflation, ie, to let money rise in value over time. Another is to make money bear interest. That is tricky with cash, but it is exactly what the Fed does when it pays interest on bank reserves.
The utility of interest-bearing money shows up in financial markets, where demand for money-like instruments is rampant. A paper by Robin Greenwood, Samuel Hanson and Jeremy Stein, all of Harvard, finds that such is the ____6____ for one-week Treasury bills that from 1983 to 2009 they yielded, on average, 72 basis points (hundredths of a percentage point) less than six-month bills (for comparison, the difference in yield today between a five-year Treasury and a ten-year one is below 50 basis points).
This poses a problem. The authors ____7____ that when there is not enough money, the private sector steps in, by issuing very short-term debt like asset-backed commercial paper. Unfortunately, such instruments can cause crises. A run on money-market funds, which had gorged on short-term private debt, was central to the ____8____ in financial markets in late 2008. After one infamously “broke the buck” by lowering its share price to less than a dollar, the government guaranteed all such funds.
More money, then, can increase financial stability as well as economic efficiency. Set against these benefits are the costs of the Fed’s intervention in—or perhaps ____9____ of—financial markets. The goal of QE was to provide only a temporary economic boost. How, exactly, it did so is uncertain; on a strict reading of economic theory, it should not have worked. Yet the evidence suggests that QE brought down long-term bond yields (perhaps by signalling that policy would be loose for a long time). With the Fed now raising short-term rates, shouldn’t it nudge long-term rates up, too?
Perhaps. Yet it may be possible to do so without shrinking the balance-sheet, and hence without retiring any money. About a quarter of the Fed’s Treasuries mature in more than a decade. The Fed could ____10____ these for shorter-term securities, reversing an earlier policy dubbed “Operation Twist”. At the same time, it could replace its portfolio of mortgage-backed securities—which it has no good reason to hang on to—with more Treasuries.

1. unwind
   struggle
   tangle
   agitate
   All are Correct
   Option A
   

    

2. inflates
   swelled
   tumid
   increase
   All are Correct
   Option B
   

    

3. billowing
   rolling
   tumbling
   toppling
   All are Correct
   Option E
   

    

4. dried
   parched
   greedy
   saturated
   All are Correct
   Option D
   

    

5. disappear
   terminate
   reduction
   action
   All are Correct
   Option A
   

    

6. aspiration
   appetite
   desire
   crave
   All are Correct
   Option B
   

    

7. concur
   consider
   argue
   abstain
   All are Correct
   Option C
   

    

8. breakdown
   fiasco
   collapse
   meltdown
   All are Correct
   Option E
   meltdown = a disastrous collapse or breakdown.

    

9. distortion
   clarity
   charisma
   actuality
   All are Correct
   Option A
   distortion = the action of giving a misleading account or impression.

    

10. maintain
    swap
    preserve
    discard
    All are Correct
    Option B
    swap = Swap refers to an exchange of one financial instrument for another between the parties concerned. This exchange takes place at a predetermined time, as specified in the contract.