Central banks make public the results of open market operations (OMOs), which they use to adjust the liquidity available to the financial system to maintain the short-term borrowing rate in the range compatible with achieving their monetary policy objectives. This paper shows that such...

Press releases announcing and explaining monetary policy decisions play a critical role in the communication strategy of central banks. Because of their market-moving potential, it is particularly important how they are drafted. Often, central banks start from the previous statement and update...

Though unconventional monetary policy is still new, already there is a conventional wisdom that the impact of monetary policy is related to the composition of the asset mix. This turns out to be incomplete and potentially misleading. In this paper, we find more complex effects on bank lending...

The concept of settlement balances is simple in its definition but complex when attempting to understand how they interplay between a central bank and the financial system. Settlement balances can be defined as interest-bearing deposits that belong to participants of Canada's payment system and...

As part of its response to the global banking crisis and a sharp downturn in domestic economic prospects, the Bank of England' s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) began a programme of large-scale asset purchases (commonly referred to as quantitative easing or QE) in March 2009, with the aim of...

The authors find that between 1870 and 1913, large open market purchases of Treasury securities made by the U.S. Treasury Department narrowed the yield spread between Treasury bonds with high interest rate risk (the risk of an investment's value changing on account of interest rate changes) and...

This paper considers the uncertainty associated with upcoming Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements and the extent to which participants in the fed funds futures market prepare for such announcements before they actually occur. We demonstrate that markets set up well in advance of...

I provide a simple general equilibrium model of monetary policy implementation and pass-through for undergraduate and graduate teaching. Besides a household and a firm, the model features a continuum of commercial banks, a government, and a central bank. The household uses deposits and cash to...