Search Results
Working Paper
A Macroeconomic Model of Central Bank Digital Currency
We develop a quantitative New Keynesian DSGE model to study the introduction of a central bank digital currency (CBDC): government-backed digital money available to retail consumers. At the heart of our model are monopolistic banks with market power in deposit and loan markets. When a CBDC is introduced, households benefit from an expansion of liquidity services and higher deposit rates as bank deposit market power is curtailed. However, deposits also flow out of the banking system and bank lending contracts. We assess this welfare trade-off for a wide range of economies that differ in their ...
Working Paper
Allan Meltzer: How He Underestimated His Own Contribution to the Modern Concept of a Central Bank
In his great work A History of the Federal Reserve System, vol. 1, Allan Meltzer contended that monetary policymakers in the Depression simply ignored the quantity theoretic prescriptions that would have prevented contractionary monetary policy. Practically, he was arguing that the Fed should have accepted the responsibilities for economic stabilization now taken for granted with the modern concept of a central bank. In reality, decades of monetarist criticism had to pass before the Fed accepted both responsibility for the behavior of the price level and economic stabilization. In effect, ...
Working Paper
FOMC Responses to Calls for Transparency
I apply latent semantic analysis to Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) transcripts and minutes from 1976 to 2008 in order to analyze the Fed's responses to calls for transparency. Using a newly constructed measure of the transparency of deliberations, I study two events that define markedly different periods of transparency over this 32-year period. First, the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Act increased the degree to which the FOMC used meeting minutes to convey the content of its meetings. Historical evidence suggests that this increased transparency reflected a response to the Act's requirement ...
Speech
The Outlook for the Economy and Monetary Policy: Low-Frequency Policymaking in a High-Frequency World
Good afternoon. I thank Ellen Zentner and the New York Association for Business Economics for the invitation to speak to you today. I believe that one of the important responsibilities of a Federal Reserve policymaker is to share his or her economic perspectives with the public. Congress has wisely given the Fed independence in making monetary policy decisions in pursuit of our statutory goals of price stability and maximum employment. I say "wisely" because a body of research and practical experience both here and abroad show that when central banks formulate monetary policy free from ...
Journal Article
Central Banks and Climate Risks
Some researchers look at climate change and see economic uncertainty. Central banks are beginning to take notice
Unleashing Hamilton’s Financial Revolution
The federal government’s assumption of Revolutionary War debt was part of what historians now describe as Hamilton’s financial revolution.
Journal Article
Responses of International Central Banks to the COVID-19 Crisis
This article reviews and explains the recent policy reactions of the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and the Bank of Japan to the financial and macroeconomic turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The financial and monetary policy actions of major central banks in the most recent crisis have, by some metrics, surpassed their responses to the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09 in both swiftness and scope.
Speech
Global Issues, Global Implications
Remarks at the Central Reserve Bank of Peru (BCRP) Centenary Conference (delivered via videoconference).
Speech
Recent Global Developments and Central Bank Responsibilities in a Changing Risk Landscape
Remarks at the Official Sector Service Providers (OSSP)-Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM)-South East Asian Central Banks (SEACEN) Research and Training Centre Forum on Central Bank Foreign Currency Operations.
Journal Article
The Fed’s Yield-Curve-Control Policy
The recent global financial crisis left governments in many advanced countries with very heavy debt burdens and their central banks with huge portfolios of government bonds. With many central banks today still facing policy rates that are uncomfortably close to zero, some may follow the example of Japan, which recently added a new long-term interest rate target to its short-term target to give itself ?yield-curve control.? The Federal Reserve?s foray into similar territory around the Second World War suggests that combining yield-curve control with quantitative easing when government ...