The popular press would lead us to believe that during the stock market boom of the 1990s just about everyone was buying and selling bonds every day. In fact, evidence shows that most households make only infrequent changes to their investment portfolios. "In The Role of Market Segmented Markets...

President Santomero reviews both the areas of agreement and those open to debate and offers his perspective on them. He concludes with some thoughts about the implications for the conduct of monetary policy.

Do monetary policy actions have a uniform national effect? Or do the separate, but interdependent, regions of the country respond differently to changes in policy? In this article, Jerry Carlino and Bob DeFina demonstrate that monetary policy does have differential effects across regions. They...

Should monetary policymakers in the U.S. adopt explicit inflation targeting? After all, the Fed has steadily reduced inflation over the past 25 years without resorting to an explicit inflation target. But having achieved price stability, we must now deal with the matter of maintaining it. In...

President Anthony Santomero points out that conducting a successful monetary policy presents real-world challenges, such as evaluating where the economy is, where it is going, and where it should be going. But how do monetary policymakers make decisions about the economy in a world with...

Inflation expectations play a central role in models of the Phillips curve. At long time horizons inflation expectations may reflect the credibility of a monetary authority's commitment to price stability. These observations highlight the importance of inflation expectations for monetary policy....