The standard workhorse models of monetary policy now commonly in use, both for teaching macroeconomics to students and for supporting policymaking within many central banks, are incapable of incorporating the most widely accepted accounts of how the 2007-9 financial crisis occurred and incapable...

The extraordinary increase in reliance on debt by U.S. business in the 1980s has generated widespread concern that overextended borrowers may become unable to meet their obligations and that proliferating defaults could then lead to some kind of rupture of the financial system, with ensuing...

What stands out in retrospect about U.S. monetary policy during the Greenspan Era is the ongoing movement away from mechanistic restrictions on the conduct of policy, together with a willingness on occasion to depart even from what more flexible guidelines dictated by contemporary conventional...

The threat to monetary policy from the electronic revolution in banking is the possibility of a decoupling' of the operations of the central bank from markets in which financial claims are created and transacted in ways that, at some operative margin, affect the decisions of households and firms...

I argue in this paper that one of the two forms of hitherto unconventional monetary policy that many central banks have implemented in response to the 2007 financial crisis - large-scale asset purchases, or to put the matter more generically, use of the central bank's balance sheet as a distinct...

Conventional monetary policy rules based on intermediate targets, like the growth of money or credit, rest on the presumption that relationships correcting these variables to key measures of nonfinancial economic activity like income and prices are robust. When financial markets change in such a...

This paper reports empirical results indicating that there is no compelling evidence in favor of singling outany one variable as "the intermediate target" of monetary policy. Of the variables considered here - including money (M1), credit, a long-term interest rate, and whichever of either...

Inflation targeting offers the promise of introducing to monetary policy a logic and consistency that some central banks' deliberations sorely missed in the past. At least in today's inherited monetary policymaking context, however, inflation targeting also serves two further objectives that are...

Monetary policy is one of the two principal means (the other being fiscal policy) by which government authorities in a market economy regularly influence the pace and direction of overall economic activity, importantly including not only the level of aggregate output and employment but also the...

The evidence presented in this paper leads to three conclusions about possible effects on the U.S. long-term capital. raising mechanism due to the sharp increase in interest rate volatility that has followed the Federal Reserve System's adoption of new monetary policy procedures in 1979. First,...