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Journal Article
Interest rate smoothing remains a controversial topic
Journal Article
The practice of central banking in other industrialized countries
Central banks in larger industrialized countries increasingly favor market operations, the buying and selling of securities, over standing facilities, such as lending and deposit facilities, in conducting their monetary policies. In their market operations, foreign central banks most commonly trade securities issued or guaranteed by their governments and repurchase agreements that are backed by a variety of assets, including private securities and securities denominated in foreign currencies. Some also trade in securities that are issued by other governments or private securities that are ...
Journal Article
Foreign exchange swaps
Foreign exchange swaps have appeared for some time in the intervention toolkit of many central banks around the world, although their popularity seems to be on the wane. In a Bank for International Settlements survey taken in 1997 (BIS 1997, p. 332), seven of fourteen industrial-country central banks surveyed listed foreign exchange swaps against either the U.S. dollar or the deutsche mark (or both) among the tools used to conduct open market intervention. Of those seven, five-Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands-discontinued foreign exchange operations when they became part ...
Working Paper
Measuring the liquidity effect
This paper develops a measure of the immediate effect on the federal funds rate of an open market operation. Because open market operations are often responses to current or anticipated economic developments, there is a serious problem of simultaneous equations bias in measuring this effect. This paper resolves this problem by developing a proxy for the errors the Federal Reserve makes in forecasting the extent to which Treasury operations will add or drain reserves available to private banks. These errors induce fluctuations in bank reserve which have measurable consequences for the ...
Journal Article
How stimulatory are large-scale asset purchases?
The Federal Reserve?s large-scale purchases of long-term Treasury securities most likely provided a moderate boost to economic growth and inflation. Importantly, the effects appear to depend greatly on the Fed?s guidance that short-term interest rates would remain low for an extended period. Indeed, estimates from a macroeconomic model suggest that such interest rate forward guidance probably has greater effects than signals about the amount of assets purchased.