During the Bretton Woods era, balance-of-payments developments, gold losses, and exchange-rate concerns had little influence on Federal Reserve monetary policy, even after 1958 when such issues became critical. The Federal Reserve could largely disregard international considerations because the...

The dollar's depreciation during the early floating rate period, 1973-1981, was a symptom of the Great Inflation. In that environment, sterilized foreign exchange interventions were ineffective in halting the dollar's decline, but they showed a limited ability to smooth dollar movements. Only...

The Federal Reserve abandoned foreign-exchange-market intervention because it conflicted with the System's commitment to price stability. By the early 1980s, economists generally concluded that, absent a portfolio-balance channel, sterilized foreign-exchange-market intervention did not provide...

This paper presents a 16-variable Bayesian VAR forecasting model of the U.S. economy for use in a monetary policy setting. The variables that comprise the model are selected not only for their effectiveness in forecasting the primary variables of interest, but also for their relevance to the...

If official interventions convey private information useful for price discovery in foreign-exchange markets, then they should have value as a forecast of near-term exchange-rate movements. Using a set of standard criteria, we show that approximately 60 percent of all U.S. foreign-exchange...

Recent monetary policy experience suggests a simple diagnostic for models of monetary non-neutrality. Suppose the central bank pegs the nominal interest rate below steady state for a reasonably short period of time. Familiar intuition suggests that this should be modestly inflationary, and a...

Foreign-exchange operations did not end after the United States stopped its activist approach to intervention. Japan persisted in such operations, but avoided overt conflict with its monetary policy. With the onset of the Great Recession, Switzerland has transacted in foreign exchange both for...

Recent monetary policy experience suggests a simple test of models of monetary non-neutrality. Suppose the central bank pegs the nominal interest rate below steady state for a reasonably short period of time. Familiar intuition suggests that this should be inflationary. But a monetary model...

We consider two approaches to incorporate judgment into DSGE models. First, Bayesian estimation indirectly imposes judgment via priors on model parameters, which are then mapped into a judgmental interest rate decision. Standard priors are shown to be associated with highly unrealistic...

This paper investigates how the presence of pervasive financial frictions and large financial shocks changes the optimal monetary policy prescriptions and the estimated dynamics in a New Keynesian model. We find that financial factors affect the optimal policy only to some extent. A policy of...