Over the last two decades, communication has become an increasingly importantaspect of monetary policy. These real-world developments have spawned a huge newscholarly literature on central bank communicationmostly empirical, and almost all of it written in this decade. We survey this...

Unlike my distinguished fellow panelists, I am not the head of a central bank. So I take my marching orders from the conference organizers. In this case, they asked me to ruminate on the extent to which central banks’ independence and credibility have been affected by their actions during the...

About six years ago, I published a small book entitled The Quiet Revolution (Blinder 2004). Though its subtitle was Central Banking Goes Modern, I never imagined the half of it. Since March 2008, the Federal Reserve has gone post-modern with a bewildering variety of unprecedented actions that...