The monetary standard emerges out of the interaction of monetary policy with the structure of the economy. Characterization of the monetary standard thus requires specification of a model of the economy with a central bank reaction function. Such a specification raises all the fundamental issues...

According to the Taylor rule, the Federal Reserve sets the funds rate based on an estimate of the economy's unutilized resources and the contemporaneous behavior of inflation. The primary policy prescription deriving from this view is that the Fed has failed to control inflation when it has not...

The question of whether monetary policy should be guided by legislated rules or left to the discretion of the policymaker has been a subject of debate since the early days of central banking. An important episode of the debate occurred in the 1920s when Kansas Congressman James Strong introduced...

The movement toward increased transparency on the part of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has concentrated on additional explicitness about the forecasts of the economy by its individual participants. Especially with the funds rate near its zero lower bound, the FOMC has become more...