Federal Reserve Operations in the Money and Government Securities Markets.

Targets, instruments, and indicators of monetary policy

Central banks no longer set the short-term interest rates that they use for monetary policy purposes by manipulating the supply of banking system reserves, as in conventional economics textbooks; this process normally involves little or no variation in the supply of central bank liabilities. In effect, the announcement effect has displaced the liquidity effect as the fulcrum of monetary policy implementation. The chapter begins with an exposition of the traditional view of the implementation of monetary policy, and an assessment of the relationship between the quantity of reserves, appropriately defined, and the level of short-term interest rates. Event studies show no relationship between the two for the United States, the Euro-system, or Japan. Structural estimates of banks' reserve demand, at a frequency corresponding to the required reserve maintenance period, show no interest elasticity for the U.S. or the Euro-system (but some elasticity for Japan). The chapter next develops a model of the overnight interest rate setting process incorporating several key features of current monetary policy practice, including in particular reserve averaging procedures and a commitment, either explicit or implicit, by the central bank to lend or absorb reserves in response to differences between the policy interest rate and the corresponding target. A key implication is that if reserve demand depends on the difference between current and expected future interest rates, but not on the current level per se, then the central bank can alter the market-clearing interest rate with no change in reserve supply. This implication is borne out in structural estimates of daily reserve demand and supply in the U.S.: expected future interest rates shift banks' reserve demand, while changes in the interest rate target are associated with no discernable change in reserve supply. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implementation of monetary policy during the recent financial crisis, and the conditions under which the interest rate and the size of the central bank's balance sheet could function as two independent policy instruments.

Chapter 24 – Implementation of Monetary Policy: How Do Central Banks Set Interest Rates?☆

A Comparative Perspective on Japanese Monetary Policy: Short-Run Monetary Control and the Transmission Mechanism

From the 1960s to the 1980s, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis played an important and highly visible role in the development and advocacy of stabilization policy based on the targeting of monetary aggregates. Research conducted at the St. Louis Bank extended earlier monetarist analysis that had focused on the role of money in explaining economic activity in the long run. Their success in finding apparently robust, stable relationships in both long- and short-run data led monetarists to apply long-run propositions to short-run policy questions, effectively competing with alternative views of the time. When the short-run correlation between money and economic activity went astray in the early 1980s, however, the efficacy of the monetarist rule and appeals for targeting monetary aggregates to achieve economic stabilization quickly lost credibility. This article traces the evolution of monetary policy research at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis as it moved from the identification of long-run relationships between money and economic activity toward short-run policy analysis. The authors show how monetarists were lulled into advocating a short-run stabilization policy and argue that this experience councils against overconfidence in our ability to identify infallible rules for conducting short-run stabilization policy in general.

methods

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Federal Reserve Operations in the Money and Government Securities Markets.

Citations

Targets, instruments, and indicators of monetary policy

Chapter 24 – Implementation of Monetary Policy: How Do Central Banks Set Interest Rates?☆

A Comparative Perspective on Japanese Monetary Policy: Short-Run Monetary Control and the Transmission Mechanism

The Rise and Fall of a Policy Rule: Monetarism at the St. Louis Fed, 1968-1986

Federal reserve policy in the great contraction: A counterfactual assessment

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