An examination of arguments for and against the suggestion that nations should return to a Bretton Woods-type system of fixed exchange rates.

An analysis of the forecast value of U.S. interventions in the foreign exchange market over the past seven years, which finds that official transactions by U.S. monetary authorities generally did not seem to improve the efficiency with which the foreign exchange market obtained information...

A review of three channels through which central bank intervention could alter exchange rates, concluding that sterilized intervention is a very limited policy tool.

A review of recent literature on central-bank intervention in exchange markets, finding some qualified support for the power of intervention to influence market expectations, but finding little evidence to support the interventionist policy the G-3 countries have conducted in recent years.

Research has generally failed to find reliable connections between official exchange-market interventions and exchange rates that are consistent with either a monetary or a portfolio-balance theory of exchange-rate determination. Recently economists have suggested that intervention might...

An examination of the Federal Reserve's intervention successes in the late 1980s, showing that, although the characteristic day-to-day fluctuations in exchange rates virtually ensured that a large share of these interventions would appear successful--purely by chance and even in the absence of a...

An argument that for countries with well-developed money markets and flexible exchange rates, there is little to be gained from holding a vast foreign exchange portfolio and intervening in the world's currency markets.

When short-term interest rates hover near zero, central banks may have difficulty offsetting downward momentum on prices and economic activity through traditional monetary-policy channels, since commercial banks have little incentive to make loans. Economists refer to this situation as a...

An examination of causality between dollar exchange-rate movements and U.S. price levels as described by the relative purchasing power parity theory, with a discussion of channels of price pressure and of the Hooper-Lowrey method of estimating future trends of the dollar.

A discussion of three channels through which U.S. intervention policy could theoretically influence the foreign-exchange market: the monetary channel, the portfolio-adjustment channel, and the expectations channel.