A description of the little-known rules governing the holding of required clearing balances at the Federal Reserve Banks, a look at the growing popularity of this relatively new phenomenon, and an analysis of its impact on the setting and measuring of monetary policy.

An argument for an institutional reform to lengthen the reserve- accounting period from one week to four weeks and to stagger the reserve-accounting periods among four groups of banks. Such staggered- reserve accounting would allow the Federal Reserve to set operating targets for total reserves.

After two decades of successfully restoring price stability in much of the world economy, central banks begin the next millennium facing a new set of challenges. One key task is how to conduct monetary policy in an era of price stability. Clearly, policymakers would like inflation to remain...

Reserve requirements have traditionally been viewed as a key instrument of monetary policy. Indeed, textbook discussions of monetary policy typically center on the role of reserve requirements in determining the size of the money multiplier and the magnitude of bank credit expansion. In recent...

The traditional view of banks in the monetary and price level control process is based on banks being producers of money in the form of deposits. Some economists have recently argued, however, that growth of bank deposits has no affect on price level stability. They say that the role of banks in...

Over the past decade, the level of required balances held by depository institutions in the United States has declined dramatically. The decline in reserve balances has fueled a debate over the role of reserve requirements. On the one hand, proponents of reserve requirements argue that low...

Despite the low inflation of recent years, some observers have wondered whether rapid gains in U.S. asset prices foreshadow rising inflationary pressures. Would U.S. monetary policy be improved if Federal Reserve policymakers reacted systematically to changes in the prices of widely held assets...

Many analysts have advocated using commodity prices as a guide for monetary policy. A necessary condition is that changes in commodity prices are good predictors of future aggregate price changes. This paper examines that proposition. It shows that while commodity prices can help produce more...