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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 ...
Working Paper
The FOMC's Committee on the Directive: Behind Volcker's New Operating Procedures
On October 6, 1979, Chairman Volcker announced that the Federal Reserve was embarking on a new, forceful, and ultimately successful campaign to lower the rampant inflation of that time. At the center of this campaign were new operating procedures for conducting monetary policy—procedures that focused daily open market operations on controlling the quantity of monetary reserves and the quantity of nonborrowed reserves in particular. This was a dramatic shift from the prior focus on targeting the federal funds rate. These new operating procedures were preceded by well over a decade of work ...