This paper investigates the effectiveness of one of the Federal Reserve’s unconventional monetary policy tools, the term auction facility (TAF). At issue is whether the TAF reduced the spread between the London interbank offered rate (LIBOR) rates and equivalent-term Treasury rates by reducing...

The phrase "liquidity effect" was introduced by Milton Friedman (1969) to describe the first of three effects on interest rates caused by an exogenous change in the money supply. The lack of empirical support for the liquidity effect using monthly and quarterly monetary and reserve aggregates...

The authors document the provision of liquidity in Swiss francs (CHF) by the Swiss National Bank (SNB) to banks located outside Switzerland during the recent financial crisis. What makes the Swiss case special is the size of this liquidity provision—at times, 80 percent of all short-term CHF...