The Federal Reserve's weekly data release shows stable currency demand through February 15.

During the week ending February 15, currency in circulation grew by $1.1 billion from $465.9 billion to $467 billion.

Demand deposits (basically money in checking accounts) grew by about $5 billion and savings deposits grew by about $8 billion.

As always, I invite anyone with actual knowledge of Fed data to offer more insight. You can see these figures for yourself by going to http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/H6/Current/

The data does not extrapolate to show depletion of the Feds current reserves (which are reputed to be about $150 billion) within the next twelve months. Of course, the data may not have any predictive value. In my opinion, it would psychologically very difficult for Americans to hoard cash during the Thanksgiving to New Year's holiday period since that is such a free spending period. I'm not sure that the masses of Americans are capable of saving significant quantities of cash while at the exact same time loading up the credit cards to buy this year's incarnation of Furby.

-- Puddintame (dit@dot.com), February 26, 1999

Answers

Puddintame,

Did you getany further info about this?

-- Watchful (seethesea@msn.com), March 21, 1999.

Watchful, Yes, I believe I started another thread the following week title something like "Fed Data Shows Steady High Demand for US Currency." If you find it, be sure to read all the way to the end, because the original post has a typo saying 11% monthly growth when I meant 1.1%.

By the way, I checked the figures put out this week, and the growth rate was something like 0.7% which is pretty much near the norm for 1998.

I'm going to try to just post the monthly figures instead of commenting every week. I'll comment on a weekly figure if it seems way out of line with historical figures.

-- Puddintame (dit@dot.com), March 21, 1999.