Scott Fullwiler and Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray review the roles of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury in the context of quantitative easing, and find that the financial crisis has highlighted the limited oversight of Congress and the limited transparency of the Fed. And since a Fed promise...

Beyond its original mission to 'furnish an elastic currency' as lender of last resort and manager of the payments system, the Federal Reserve has always been responsible (along with the Treasury) for regulating and supervising member banks. After World War II, Congress directed the Fed to pursue...

Those warning of “helicopter drops” of money by central bankers, as Ben Bernanke is often accused of doing in 2010, actually do not understand modern monetary operations. This post demonstrates that central bank operations generally are not helicopter drops, while fiscal operations in fact...

Financial innovations have reduced banks' reserve holdings. Some argue the Fed's ability to set interest rates might be compromised. This concerns arises from a misunderstanding of Fed operations. Regardless of the quantity of reserve balances, the Fed can always set its federal funds rate...

At its core, there are two parts to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). The first is a description of how the monetary system actually works, mostly focusing upon interactions between the central bank, the treasury, and the financial system, though this part also requires a very thorough understanding...

Recognizing that analysis of the daily activities have recently become a standard part of the monetary economics literature, this paper provides a detailed description of the Fed's daily tactics from an institutionalist perspective. The three relevant categories of time in the Fed's daily...

A number of debates are taking place regarding the appropriate response of monetary policy both to the crisis and the Great Recession that followed, particularly in regard to interest on reserve balances and so-called unconventional monetary policy operations. This paper describes in detail an...