The U.S. dollar clearing and settlement system received little attention during the recent financial crisis, mainly because it performed reliably, processing record volumes and values of trades made in stressed financial markets. This article shows how Federal Reserve policy measures aimed at...

The Federal Reserve's Fedwire funds transfer service-the biggest large-value payments system in the United States-has long displayed a peak of activity in the late afternoon. Theory suggests that the concentration of late-afternoon Fedwire activity reflects coordination among participating banks...

Over the course of 2018, economic activity in major advanced foreign economies and emerging markets—including the Euro area and China—decelerated noticeably. In parallel, foreign growth projections for 2019 and 2020 were revised down, signaling potentially large headwinds for the U.S economy...

The influence of the Federal Reserve’s unanticipated target rate decisions on U.S. asset prices has been the subject of numerous studies. More recently, researchers have looked at the asset price response to statements issued by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). Yet, despite a vast and...

The ability of central banks to differentiate between permanent and transitory price movements is critical for the conduct of monetary policy. The importance of gauging the persistence of price changes in a timely manner has led to the development of measures of underlying, or core, inflation...

The small decline in the value of mortgage-related assets relative to the large total losses associated with the financial crisis suggests the presence of financial amplification mechanisms, which allow relatively small shocks to propagate through the financial system. We review the literature...

This article assesses the rationale, operations, and implications of the Federal Reserve’s market functioning purchases. The security purchases were introduced in March 2020, when massive customer selling of U.S. Treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities triggered by the...