Central banks have had an important role in maintaining financial stability through their lender of last resort role. As lender of last resort, the central bank is given enormous power which is normally tempered by a variety of limits. In the most recent crises in both the United States and euro...

The Covid-19 Pandemic and policy response rattled the USTreasury markets. Conventional US Treasuries, inflation adjustedUS Treasuries, and the relationship between the two developed inways such that ignoring changes in real interest rates yielded dis-torted inflation expectations estimates....

We evaluate the decentralized structure of the Federal Reserve System as a mechanism for generating and processing new ideas on monetary policy over the 1960 - 2000 period. We document the introduction of monetarism, rational expectations, credibility, transparency, and other monetary policy...

Though unconventional monetary policy is still new, already there is a conventional wisdom that the impact of monetary policy is related to the composition of the asset mix. This turns out to be incomplete and potentially misleading. In this paper, we find more complex effects on bank lending...

The Term Auction Facility (TAF) was designed by the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis to inject emergency short-term funds into banks as a supplement to the lender of last resort discount window offerings. We describe how the Federal Reserve altered the design of the Term Auction...

On 16th November 2009, SUERF, CEPS and the Belgian Financial Forum coorganized a conference "Crisis management at cross-roads" in Brussels. All papers in the present volume are based on contributions at the conference and the SUERF Annual Lecture which followed the event.

We document regime change in the U.S. Treasury market post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC): dealers switched from a net short to a net long position in the Treasury market. We first derive bounds on Treasury yields that account for dealer balance sheet costs, which we call the net short and net...

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the U.S. Federal Reserve publishes the range of members' forecasts for key macroeconomic variables, but not the distribution of forecasts within this range. To evaluate these projections, previous papers compare the midpoint of the ranges with the...

This paper analyzes whether Taylor-type policy rules can be used to describe the behavior of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank from the beginning of 1999 until mid 2002. Since there was no common monetary policy for the Euro area before 1999, we examine if the average Central...