When individuals and firms have faith that monetary policymakers will stick to the rules over time, they can better anticipate the future and make economic decisions accordingly.

This PDP summarizes the papers presented at the 2005 Summer Workshop on Money, Banking, and Payments at the Cleveland Fed. Papers covered a wide variety of topics in monetary theory and policy, banking, and payments systems research. Topics ranged from optimal monetary policy, optimal bank...

The 2007 Summer Workshop on Money, Banking, Payments and Finance met at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland this summer, as we have over the past several years. The following document summarizes and ties together the contributions presented at the workshop this year.

Conventional wisdom holds that if policymakers are too focused on controlling inflation, then employment, output growth and financial stability will suffer. But the conventional wisdom is wrong, according to the data.

Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) projections are important because they provide information for evaluating current monetary policy intentions and because they indicate what FOMC members think will be the likely consequence of their policies. Knowing the Fed’s objectives, their forecasts,...

The target set by the FOMC for the federal funds rate applies to the entire country. But that single policy has a different impact on different parts of the country, depending on their concentration of interest-sensitive industries.

To protect the economy in the short run, the Fed acted quickly on five fronts to provide emergency liquidity. But in the long run, no major change in monetary policy should be needed because the fundamentals of the economy remain solid.