The fact that money, banking, and financial markets interact in important ways seems self-evident. The theoretical nature of this interaction, however, has not been fully explored. To this end, we integrate the Diamond (1997) model of banking and financial markets with the Lagos and Wright...

The fact that money, banking, and financial markets interact in important ways seems self-evident. The theoretical nature of this interaction, however, has not been fully explored. To this end, we integrate the Diamond (1997) model of banking and financial markets with the Lagos and Wright...

The ongoing financial crisis is shaking central bankers' certainties about their mission, and a rethinking of such mission can greatly benefit from a non-finalistic reassessment of how central banking has evolved over the centuries. This paper does so by taking a functional, instead of an...

The ongoing financial crisis is shaking central bankers’ certainties about their mission, and a rethinking of such mission can greatly benefit from a non-finalistic reassessment of how central banking has evolved over the centuries. This paper does so by taking a functional, instead of an...

Unlike my distinguished fellow panelists, I am not the head of a central bank. So I take my marching orders from the conference organizers. In this case, they asked me to ruminate on the extent to which central banks’ independence and credibility have been affected by their actions during the...

About six years ago, I published a small book entitled The Quiet Revolution (Blinder 2004). Though its subtitle was Central Banking Goes Modern, I never imagined the half of it. Since March 2008, the Federal Reserve has gone post-modern with a bewildering variety of unprecedented actions that...

Several aspects of the difficulties of policy at the zero lower bound are discussed: The difficulty of credible commitment to higher future inflation, as most New Keynesian models imply is necessary; the need for fiscal and monetary policy coordination; the pitfalls in the taking of quasi-fiscal...

The recent global financial crisis has exposed the limitations of a conventional inflation targeting framework in insulating an economy from all shocks, and demonstrated that its rigid application may aggravate the effect of shocks on output and inflation. Possible refinements to the inflation...