What are "reserves," and why do banks hold them? What are "sweep accounts," and how do they work? What’s the relationship between the two? And what’s the Fed’s role in all of this? In this article, Jeff Wrase considers the effect sweep accounts have had on the market for bank reserves and...

The economic crisis and its aftermath have posed significant challenges to policymakers. To help meet those challenges, the Federal Reserve deployed several innovative policy tools to help relieve the stress in financial markets during the crisis. These tools have created their own significant...

The idea of creating a framework for explicit inflation targeting in the U.S. has recently become a topic of considerable discussion. The key question is: Could inflation targeting improve on the U.S. economy's performance? President Anthony Santomero thinks inflation targeting makes sense for...

The subject of our next article, "The Taylor Curve and the Unemployment-Inflation Tradeoff," by Satyajit Chatterjee, is finding an optimal monetary policy menu. In the past, monetary policy options were described in terms of a tradeoff between the unemployment rate and the inflation rate, the...