Search Results
Journal Article
Stock market booms and monetary policy in the twentieth century
This article examines the association between stock market booms and monetary policy in the United States and nine other developed countries during the 20th century. The authors find, as was true of the U.S. stock market boom of 1994-2000, that booms typically arose during periods of above-average growth of real output and below-average inflation, suggesting that booms reflected both real macroeconomic phenomena and monetary policy. They find little evidence that booms were fueled by excessive liquidity. Booms often ended within a few months of an increase in inflation and consequent monetary ...
Working Paper
The Evolution of the Federal Reserve Swap Lines since 1962
In this paper, we describe the evolution of the Federal Reserve?s swap lines from their inception in 1962 as a mechanism to forestall claims on US gold reserves under Bretton Woods to their use during the Great Recession as a means of extending emergency dollar liquidity. We describe the Federal Reserve?s successes and failures. We argue that swaps calm crisis situations by both supplementing foreign countries? dollar reserves and by signaling central-bank cooperation. We show how swaps exposed the Federal Reserve to conditionality and raised fears that they bypassed the Congressional ...
Working Paper
Gold, fiat money and price stability
The classical gold standard has long been associated with long-run price stability. But short-run price variability led critics of the gold standard to propose reforms that look much like modern versions of price-path targeting. This paper uses a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to examine price dynamics under alternative policy regimes. In the model, an inflation target provides more short-run price stability than does the gold standard and, although it introduces a unit root into the price level, it leads to as much long-term price stability as does the gold standard for ...
Working Paper
On the evolution of U.S. foreign-exchange-market intervention: thesis, theory, and institutions
Attitudes about foreign-exchange-market intervention in the United States evolved in tandem with views about monetary policy as policy makers grappled with the perennial problem of having more economic objectives than independent instruments with which to achieve them. This paper?the introductory chapter to our history of U.S. foreign exchange market intervention?explains this thesis and summarizes our conclusion: The Federal Reserve abandoned frequent foreign-exchange-market intervention because, rather than providing a solution to the instruments-versus-objectives problem, it interfered ...
Working Paper
Federal Reserve Policy and Bretton Woods
During the Bretton Woods era, balance-of-payments developments, gold losses, and exchange rate concerns had little influence on Federal Reserve monetary policy, even after 1958 when such issues became critical. The Federal Reserve could largely disregard international considerations because the U.S. Treasury instituted a number of stop-gap devices?the gold pool, the general agreement to borrow, capital restraints, sterilized foreign-exchange operations?to shore up the dollar and Bretton Woods. These, however, gave Federal Reserve policymakers the latitude to focus on domestic objectives and ...
Conference Paper
Historical evidence on business cycles: the international experience
Working Paper
Money, sticky wages, and the Great Depression
This paper examines the ability of a simple stylized general equilibrium model that incorporates nominal wage rigidity to explain the magnitude and persistence of the Great Depression in the United States. The impulses to our analysis are money supply shocks. The Taylor contracts model is surprisingly successful in accounting for the behavior of major macroaggregates and real wages during the downturn phase of the Depression, i.e., from 1929:3 through mid-1933. Our analysis provides support for the hypothesis that a monetary contraction operating through a sticky wage channel played a ...
Working Paper
Low Interest Rates, Policy, and the Predictive Content of the Yield Curve
Does the yield curve’s ability to predict future output and recessions differ when interest rates are low, as in the current global environment? In this paper we build on recent econometric work by Shi, Phillips, and Hurn that detects changes in the causal impact of the yield curve and relate that to the level of interest rates. We explore the issue using historical data going back to the 19th century for the United States and more recent data for the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. This paper is similar in spirit to Ramey and Zubairy (2018), who look at the government spending ...
Working Paper
Federal Reserve policy and Bretton Woods
During the Bretton Woods era, balance-of-payments developments, gold losses, and exchange-rate concerns had little influence on Federal Reserve monetary policy, even after 1958 when such issues became critical. The Federal Reserve could largely disregard international considerations because the U.S. Treasury instituted a number of stopgap devices?the gold pool, the general agreement to borrow, capital restraints, sterilized foreign-exchange operations?to shore up the dollar and Bretton Woods. These, however, gave Federal Reserve policymakers the latitude to focus on the domestic objectives ...
Working Paper
Economic policy uncertainty and the credit channel: aggregate and bank level U.S. evidence over several decades
Economic policy uncertainty aspects decisions of households, businesses, policy makers and financial intermediaries. We first examine the impact of economic policy uncertainty on aggregate bank credit growth. Then we analyze commercial bank entity level data to gauge the effects of policy uncertainty on financial intermediaries' lending. We exploit the cross-sectional heterogeneity to back out indirect evidence of its effects on businesses and households. We ask (i) whether, conditional on standard macroeconomic controls, economic policy uncertainty affected bank level credit growth, and (ii) ...