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Working Paper
Monetary Policy 101: A Primer on the Fed's Changing Approach to Policy Implementation
The Federal Reserve conducts monetary policy in order to achieve its statutory mandate of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates as prescribed by the Congress and laid out in the Federal Reserve Act. For many years prior to the financial crisis, the FOMC set a target for the federal funds rate and achieved that target through purchases and sales of securities in the open market. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, with a superabundant level of reserve balances in the banking system having been created as a result of the Federal Reserve's large scale ...
Discussion Paper
Using Generative AI Models to Understand FOMC Monetary Policy Discussions
In an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence (AI), the public’s understanding of economic policy may be filtered through the lens of generative AI models (also called large language models or LLMs). Generative AI models offer the promise of quickly ingesting and interpreting large amounts of textual information.
Discussion Paper
The FOMC Meeting Minutes: An Assessment of Counting Words and the Diversity of Views
The Federal Reserve's communications with the public have evolved substantially since the early 1990s and today include: policy statements released shortly after the conclusion of monetary policy meetings; minutes of those meetings issued three weeks later; quarterly economic forecasts from the members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the presidents of the Federal Reserve Banks; the Chair's press conferences four times per year; a semi-annual Monetary Policy Report that is submitted to the Congress and released to the public, along with the Chair's testimony on that report; and ...
Journal Article
U.S. international transactions in 1988
Journal Article
German monetary targeting: a retrospective view
Discussion Paper
The Federal Reserve's New Approach to Raising Interest Rates
At its December 2015 meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC)--the Federal Reserve's monetary policy committee--raised its target range for the federal funds rate by 25 basis points, marking the end of an extraordinary seven-year period during which the federal funds target range was held near zero to support the recovery of the U.S. economy from the worst financial crisis and recession since the Great Depression.
Journal Article
The FOMC: preferences, voting, and consensus
In this paper, the author develops and uses an original dataset collected from the internal discussion of the Federal Reserve's monetary policy committee (the Federal Open Market Committee [FOMC] transcripts) to examine questions about the Committee's behavior. The data show that Chairman Alan Greenspan's proposals, after Committee discussion, were nearly always adopted unmodified in the formal vote. Despite the external appearance of consensus with little disagreement over decisions and an official dissent rate of 7.5 percent, the data reveal that the rate of disagreement in internal ...