A primary purpose of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was to prevent banking panics by establishing the Federal Reserve System to function as a lender of last resort. Other types of financial crisis require similar response, however, and the Federal Reserve has repeatedly used its capacity to...

The Federal Reserve's large scale asset purchases (LSAP) of agency debt, MBSs and long-term U.S. Treasuries not only reduced long-term U.S. bond yields also significantly reduced long-term foreign bond yields and the spot value of the dollar. These changes were much too large to have been...