Presented by Charles I. Plosser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia> Cato Institute’s 28th Annual Monetary Conference, Washington, D.C., November 18, 2010

Presented at the National Economists Club, Washington D.C. December 2, 2010.

The dollar’s depreciation during the early floating rate period, 1973–1981, was a symptom of the Great Inflation. In that environment, sterilized foreign exchange interventions were ineffective in halting the dollar’s decline, but they showed a limited ability to smooth dollar movements....

We study the impact of the publication of central banks� macroeconomic projections on the dynamic properties of an economy where (i) private agents have incomplete information and form their expectations using recursive learning algorithms; (ii) the short-term nominal interest rate is set...

Beyond its original mission to "furnish an elastic currency" as lender of last resort and manager of the payments system, the Federal Reserve has always been responsible (along with the Treasury) for regulating and supervising member banks. After World War II, Congress directed the Fed to pursue...

We examine the evolution of monetary policy rules in a group of inflation targeting countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden and the United Kingdom) applying moment-based estimator at time-varying parameter model with endogenous regressors. Using this novel flexible framework, our main...

Expectations play a central role in modern macroeconomic theories. The econometric learning approach models economic agents as forming expectations by estimating and updating forecasting models in real time. The learning approach provides a stability test for rational expectations and a...

Applying nonstationary panel data econometric methods, this paper analyzes the major sources and transmission of inflation in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries over the 1980-2008 period. We argue that, in GCC countries, money is essentially demand determined, so that the high...

This paper surveys the particularities of monetary policy as a powerful governmental weapon in countries with transitional economies. The paper combines the theoretical analysis with empirical studies. Because in transitional economies the particular channels of monetary policy are diverse,...

Investment practice and academic literature suggest a great degree of interaction between the world’s stock markets and most liquid and safe assets, such as U.S. Treasuries. Using data from 46 markets and a 30-year time period, we examine the impact of “flight-to-liquidity” events on...