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Working Paper
Discussion on \"Scarcity of Safe Assets, Inflation, and the Policy Trap\" by Andolfatto and Williamson
This discussion was prepared for the 84th Meeting of the Carnegie-Rochester-NYU Conference Series on Public Policy "Monetary Policy: An Unprecedented Predicament" held on November 14-15, 2014, at Carnegie Mellon University.
Working Paper
A Simple General Equilibrium Model of Large Excess Reserves
I study a non-stochastic, perfect foresight, general equilibrium model with a banking system that may hold large excess reserves when the central bank pays interest on reserves. The banking system also faces a capital constraint that may or may not be binding. When the rate of interest on reserves equals the market rate, if the quantity of reserves is large and bank capital is not scarce, the price level is indeterminate. However, for a large enough level of reserves, the bank capital constraint becomes binding and the price level moves one to one with the quantity of reserves.
Working Paper
Shortages of small change in early Argentina
In this note I review evidence suggesting that shortages of small change occurred in the territory of Argentina during the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. For the colonial period (until 1810) the main pieces of evidence are: (i) the widespread use of informal means of payment, (ii) the difficulties faced in retiring from circulation low quality subsidiary coins, and (iii) the numerous official resolutions banning the exporting of fractional money from the colonies. For the period from 1810 to 1825, the episodes surrounding the introduction of copper coins ...
Journal Article
Bank risk of failure and the too-big-to-fail policy
Briefing
Large Excess Reserves and the Relationship between Money and Prices
As a consequence of the Federal Reserve's response to the financial crisis of 2007?08 and the Great Recession, the supply of reserves in the U.S. banking system increased dramatically. Historically, over long horizons, money and prices have been closely tied together, but over the past decade, prices have risen only modestly while base money (reserves plus currency) has grown substantially. A macroeconomic model helps explain this behavior and suggests some potential limits to the Fed's ability to increase the size of its balance sheet indefinitely while remaining consistent with its ...
Briefing
Projecting the Evolution of the Fed's Balance Sheet
As the Fed embarks on balance sheet policy normalization, there is natural interest in understanding the projected evolution of the Fed's asset portfolio over the next three to four years. Several important assumptions are needed to be able to predict the path of the balance sheet. Based exclusively on public information, we use alternative sets of plausible assumptions to construct and analyze several different scenarios for the future of this critical policy-relevant lever.
Journal Article
The problem of small change in early Argentina
Working Paper
Money Market Fund Reform: Dealing with the Fundamental Problem
After the events in March 2020, it became clear to policymakers that the 2014 reform of the money market funds (MMFs) industry had not successfully addressed all associated stability concerns related to surges in withdrawals. In December 2021, the SEC proposed a new set of rules governing how money market funds can operate. A fundamental problem behind the instability of (some) money market funds is the expectation that backstop liquidity support will be provided by the government in the event of financial distress, along with the government's inability to credibly commit to not provide such ...
Journal Article
On the fundamental reasons for bank fragility
A substantial body of literature has now developed as a result of efforts to identify the fundamental reasons for the fragility of financial intermediaries in the Diamond-Dybvig theory of banking. Many of these articles focus on the interaction between sequential service and uncertainty about the aggregate need for liquidity in the economy. The articles in this literature are inevitably technical and focus somewhat narrowly on the implications of specific assumptions. Here, we provide a more accessible discussion of the main ideas and findings in this literature. Our discussion can be used as ...