Remarks at Global Interdependence Center Central Banking Series Event, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

The U.S. dollar clearing and settlement system received little attention during the recent financial crisis, mainly because it performed reliably, processing record volumes and values of trades made in stressed financial markets. This article shows how Federal Reserve policy measures aimed at...

The traditional view of the monetary transmission mechanism rests on the premise that the Federal Reserve (Fed) controls the level of the federal funds rate via open market operations and the liquidity effect. By contrast, this paper argues that the Fed also manipulates the federal funds rate...

In an environment of low inflation, the Federal Reserve faces the risk that it has not provided enough monetary stimulus even when it has pushed the short-term nominal interest rate to its lower bound of zero. Assuming the nominal Treasury-bill rate has been lowered to zero, this paper considers...

Ignoring the existence of the zero bound on nominal interest rates one considerably understates the value of monetary commitment in New Keynesian models. A stochastic forward-looking model with an occasionally binding lower bound, calibrated to the U.S. economy, suggests that low values for the...

The result of Benhabib, Schmitt-Grohé, and Uribe (2001) is powerful because it relies only on three rather natural conditions: the Fisher equation, the convex Taylor rule, and the lower bound of the nominal interest rate. Their result is striking because the paper reveals the peril of the...

Replaces Working paper 91-24.