This paper examines the Federal Reserve's recent policy of quantitative easing by looking back at the experience of the 1930s and 1940s when the Fed, under Treasury control, kept interest rates at levels comparable to today and its balance sheet increased similarly. The paper also presents...

This review examines a collection of lectures given by Ben Bernanke on the Federal Reserve's actions during the 2008 financial crisis.

This paper examines the Federal Reserve's actions before, during and after the 2008 financial crisis. It looks to the Great Contraction of 1929-1933 for historical context of the Federal Reserve’s actions.

During the Bretton Woods era, balance-of-payments developments, gold losses, and exchange-rate concerns had little influence on Federal Reserve monetary policy, even after 1958 when such issues became critical. The Federal Reserve could largely disregard international considerations because the...

In this paper, we describe the evolution of the Federal Reserve’s swap lines from their inception in 1962 as a mechanism to forestall claims on US gold reserves under Bretton Woods to their use during the Great Recession as a means of extending emergency dollar liquidity. We describe the...