Search Results
Conference Paper
The effects of regulation on systemic risks
Working Paper
U.S. intervention during the Bretton Wood Era:1962-1973
By the early 1960s, outstanding U.S. dollar liabilities began to exceed the U.S. gold stock, suggesting that the United States could not completely maintain its pledge to convert dollars into gold at the official price. This raised uncertainty about the Bretton Woods parity grid, and speculation seemed to grow. In response, the Federal Reserve instituted a series of swap lines to provide central banks with cover for unwanted, but temporary accumulations of dollars and to provide foreign central banks with dollar funds to finance their own interventions. The Treasury also began intervening in ...
Working Paper
U.S. monetary-policy evolution and U.S. intervention
The United States all but abandoned its foreign-exchange-market intervention operations in late 1995, when they proved corrosive to the credibility of the Federal Reserve?s commitment to price stability. We view this decision as the culmination of the evolution of U.S. monetary policy over the past century from a gold standard to a fiat money regime. The abandonment of intervention was necessary to secure monetary policy credibility.
Working Paper
Bretton Woods, swap lines, and the Federal Reserve’s return to intervention
This paper describes the United States? first line of defense against shortcomings in the Bretton Woods system, which threatened the system?s continuation as early as 1960. The exposition describes the Federal Reserve?s use of swap lines both to provide cover for central banks? unwanted dollar exposures, thereby forestalling claims on the U.S. gold stock, and to supply dollar liquidity to countries facing temporary balance-of-payments deficits, thereby bolstering confidence in their parities. As suggested by the expansion and growing use of the swap lines, the operations failed to distinguish ...
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
Bretton Woods and the U.S. decision to intervene in the foreign-exchange market, 1957-1962
The deterioration in the U.S. balance of payments after 1957 and an accelerating loss of gold reserves prompted U.S. monetary authorities to undertake foreign-exchange-market interventions beginning in 1961. We discuss the events leading up to these interventions, the institutional arrangements developed for that purpose, and the controversies that ensued. Although these interventions forestalled a loss of U.S. gold reserves, in the end, they only delayed more fundamental adjustments and, in that respect, were a failure.
Journal Article
Schwartz on Friedman
Journal Article
The misuse of the Fed's discount window
Working Paper
A brief empirical history of U.S. foreign-exchange intervention: 1973-1995
This paper assesses U.S. foreign-exchange intervention since the inception of generalized floating. We find that intervention was by and large ineffectual. We first identify which interventions were successful according to three criteria. Then, we test whether the number of observed successes significantly exceeds the amount that would randomly occur given the near-martingale nature of daily exchange-rate changes. Finally, we investigate whether the various characteristics of an intervention - its size, frequency, or coordination - can increase the probability of success. We find that ...
Journal Article
Assessing the Euro three years after its launch