Until 1935, Federal Reserve Banks from time to time purchased short-term securities directly from the United States Treasury to facilitate Treasury cash management operations. The authority to undertake such purchases provided a robust safety net that ensured Treasury could meet its obligations...

We compare two stylized frameworks for the implementation of monetary policy. The first framework relies only on standing facilities, and the second one relies only on open market operations. We show that the Friedman rule cannot be implemented in the first framework, but can be implemented...

Central bank communication plays an important role in shaping market participants’ expectations. This paper studies a simple nonlinear model of monetary policy in which agents have incomplete information about the economic environment. It shows that agents’ learning and the dynamics of the...

We construct a price index with weights for the prices of different PCE (personal consumption expenditures) goods chosen to minimize the welfare costs of nominal distortions. In this cost-of-nominal-distortions index (CONDI), the weights are computed in a multi-sector New Keynesian model with...

A major lesson of the recent financial crisis is that the interbank lending market is crucial for banks that face uncertainty regarding their liquidity needs. This paper examines the efficiency of the interbank lending market in allocating funds and the optimal policy of a central bank in...

The Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) was introduced by the Federal Reserve to promote liquidity in the financing markets for Treasury and other collateral. We evaluate one aspect of the program — the extent to which it has narrowed repo spreads between Treasury collateral and less...

Since December 2008, the Federal Reserve’s traditional policy instrument, the target federal funds rate, has been effectively at its lower bound of zero. In order to further ease the stance of monetary policy as the economic outlook deteriorated, the Federal Reserve purchased substantial...

While many analyses of monetary policy consider only a target for a short-term nominal interest rate, other dimensions of policy have recently been of greater importance: changes in the supply of bank reserves, changes in the assets acquired by central banks, and changes in the interest rate...

One of the most striking features of the period before the Great Recession is the strong positive correlation between house price appreciation and current account deficits, not only in the United States but also in other countries that have subsequently experienced the highest degree of...

This paper compares the properties of interest rate rules such as simple Taylor rules and rules that respond to price-level fluctuations - called Wicksellian rules - in a basic forward-looking model. By introducing appropriate history dependence in policy, Wicksellian rules perform better than...