Foreign-exchange operations did not end after the United States stopped its activist approach to intervention. Japan persisted in such operations, but avoided overt confl ict with its monetary policy. With the onset of the Great Recession, Switzerland has transacted in foreign exchange both for...

This paper describes the United States’ first line of defense against shortcomings in the Bretton Woods system, which threatened the system’s continuation as early as 1960. The exposition describes the Federal Reserve’s use of swap lines both to provide cover for central banks’ unwanted...

The authors develop a two-country real business cycle model and examine its consistency with the behavior of relative prices, and the model's implications for economic aggregates at the sectoral level.

An examination of the role of foreign banks in the loan sales market, finding that the motives for loan sales and purchases differ between U.S. and foreign-owned banks and between foreign banks of different regions, which is consistent with foreign banks' using the market for diversification.

If official interventions convey private information useful for price discovery in foreign-exchange markets, then they should have value as a forecast of near-term exchange-rate movements. Using a set of standard criteria, we show that approximately 60 percent of all U.S. foreign-exchange...

Research has generally failed to find reliable connections between official exchange-market interventions and exchange rates that are consistent with either a monetary or a portfolio-balance theory of exchange-rate determination. Recently economists have suggested that intervention might...

This paper analyzes the impact of capital market openness on exchange rate pass-through and subsequently on the social loss function in an inflation-targeting small open economy under a pure commitment policy. Applying the intuition behind the macroeconomic trilemma, the author examines whether...

The authors analyze a dual-currency search model in which agents may hold multiple units of both currencies. They study equilibria in which the two currencies are identical and equilibria in which the two currencies differ according to the magnitude of the "inflation tax" risk associated with...

An analysis of the differential impacts of reported and actual U.S. foreign exchange intervention on the mean and conditional variance of the Deutschemark-to-dollar and yen-to-dollar exchange rates. For part of the sample period, the impact of intervention on the variance of the exchange rates...

U.S. exchange-market intervention has no apparent effect on market fundamentals but may influence expectations. If intervention can accurately forecast exchange-rate movements, knowledge that the Federal Reserve is trading can alter traders' prior estimates of the distribution of exchange-rate...