Over the course of the recent liquidity crisis, the Federal Reserve made several changes to its primary credit lending facility such as narrowing the spread between the primary credit rate and the target funds rate and increasing the term of the borrowing. In this paper, we use the model...

I explore alternative credit policies in a theoretical model where (i) money is necessary as a means of payment, (ii) there is a shortage of liquidity that a central bank addresses through the extension of credit, (iii) money is necessary to repay debts, and (iv) the incentives to default are...

Central banks repo market operations and liquidity infusions occasion a structural liquidity mismatch in bank balance sheets and increase the dependence on central bank liquidity. This paper argues for what I term “Circular Monetary Economics”, an approach to monetary policy that seeks to...

Despite constituting the very heart of the monetary transmission mechanism, widespread misconceptions still exist regarding how monetary policy is implemented. This paper highlights the key misconceptions in this regard and shows how they have compromised the understanding of important aspects...

The 1998 stylized model of Krugman constituted a ground-breaking contribution explaining the long lasting Japanese stagnation as the consequence of a "liquidity trap" situation featuring a negative natural interest rate. Our critique to such a proposal will focus on three aspects. First, we will...

In a January 2009 lecture on the financial crisis, Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke advocated a new Fed policy of credit easing, defined as a combination of lending to financial institutions, providing liquidity directly to key credit markets, and buying of long term securities. We show that...

We show a significant loss in U.S. Treasury market functionality when intensive use of dealer balance sheets is needed to intermediate bond markets, as in March 2020. Although yield volatility explains most of the variation in Treasury market liquidity over time, when dealer balance sheet...