Search Results
Discussion Paper
Sizing Up the Fed's Maturity Extension Program
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) recently announced its intention to extend the average maturity of its holdings of securities by purchasing $400 billion of Treasury securities with remaining maturities of six years to thirty years and selling an equal amount of Treasury securities with remaining maturities of three years or less. The nominal size of this maturity extension program, at $400 billion, is smaller than the $600 billion of purchases during the second round of large-scale asset purchases (LSAP 2) completed in June 2011. The two programs are more comparable in size, however, ...
Discussion Paper
Fiscal Flow Volatility and Reserves
In this note, we explain what changed in terms of fiscal flows into and out of the U.S. Treasury’s account and describe implications for monetary policy.
Working Paper
The Federal Reserve's Portfolio and its Effect on Interest Rates
We explore the historical composition of the Federal Reserve's Treasury portfolio and its effect on Treasury yields. Using data from 1985 to 2016, we show that the divergence of the composition of the Federal Reserve's portfolio from overall Treasury securities outstanding is associated with a statistically significant effect on interest rates. In aggregate, when the Federal Reserve's portfolio has shorter maturity than overall Treasury debt outstanding, measures of the term premium are higher at all horizons; likewise, when the Federal Reserve's portfolio has longer maturity, term premiums ...
Working Paper
The FOMC's Use of Operational Targets: 85 Years and Counting
This paper uses summaries of the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC’s) meetings to identify its operational targets and map those to operating regimes. We find that operational targets were more often discussed in the earlier part of the FOMC’s 85-year history, but recent years have seen a resurgence in discussions. We identify distinct operating regimes and find that regimes with discussions of multiple targets, usually rate and quantity pairs, are more common than regimes dominated by discussions of single targets. We document that the current period (the 2007-2009 financial crisis ...
Working Paper
Yield curve impacts of forward guidance and maturity extension programs
In 2011 and 2012, the Federal Reserve sold Treasury securities from the short end of the yield curve at the same time it was providing market participants with date-specific assurances that overnight interest rates would not rise. We investigate how these two policies, which had conflicting pricing pressures, were absorbed by the market. We analyze the impacts of sales on the volume and composition of inventories of the Federal Reserve's counterparties, and examine how announcements of accommodative monetary policy affected spreads and prices across maturities. Our results suggest that these ...
Working Paper
Modelling Overnight RRP Participation
We examine how market participants have used the Federal Reserve?s overnight reverse repurchase (ON RRP) exercise and how short-term interest rates have evolved between December 2013 and November 2014. We show that money market fund (MMF) participation is sensitive to the spread between market repo rates and the ON RRP offering rate as well as Treasury bill issuance, government sponsored enterprise (GSE) participation is more heavily driven by calendar effects, dealers tend to only participate when rate spreads are negative, and banks generally do not participate. We also find that the effect ...