The determinants of monetary target credibility

This paper examines the impact of several different factors on the credibility of the Federal Reserve's monetary targets. Two factors appear to explain why the targets became less credible during the 1980s. First, the Fed's shift from M1 to M2 targets reduced credibility because the latter aggregate is less controllable. Second, velocity instability caused the Fed to widen the target ranges and this action signaled that they were placing less weight on monetary targets in the conduct of monetary policy.     

Security markets and the information content of monetary policy turning points

Substantial evidence shows that a significant relationship exists between Federal Reserve monetary policy signals and subsequent security returns. Recent evidence, however, suggests that Fed rate changes do not signal shifts in monetary policy and therefore have no real policy significance. In this study, we investigate whether certain Fed signals, characterized as turning points in the monetary cycle, have real policy significance. Our evidence suggests that the Fed's signal that a turning point is occurring is unambiguous, predicts a substantial shift in Fed monetary policy, and provides costless and meaningful information about future security market returns.     

Lessons from a century of FED policy: Why monetary and credit policies need rules and boundaries

Wide operational and financial independence given to monetary and credit policies subjects the Federal Reserve to incentives detrimental for macroeconomic and financial stability. The absence of a monetary policy rule created go-stop incentives that produced inefficient volatility of both inflation and unemployment during the Great Inflation. Fed credit policy has undergone massive “mission creep” since the Fed was established. Being debt-financed fiscal policy, Fed credit policy beyond ordinary temporary lending to solvent depositories creates friction with the fiscal authorities and jeopardizes the Fed׳s independence. An ambiguous boundary of expansive Fed credit policy creates expectations of Fed accommodation in financial crisis—that blunts the incentive of private entities to take protective measures beforehand (to shrink counter-party risk and reliance on short-term finance, and build up equity capital) and blunts the incentive of the fiscal authorities to prepare procedures in advance to act systematically in times of credit turmoil. These points are illustrated with reference to the 2007–09 financial crisis. Part of the problem is that the independent Fed does not have the same incentive as the 19th century Bank of England to follow Bagehot׳s Rule. The paper concludes with a set of principles to preserve a workable, sustainable division of responsibilities between the independent central bank and the fiscal authorities.     

Effect of monetary policy shocks on the racial unemployment rates in the US

This study analyzes the effect of monetary policy shocks on the unemployment rate of different racial groups in the US, using data from 1969Q2 to 2015Q4. Employing a narrative approach to identify monetary policy shocks and local projections, we find that although an expansionary monetary shock affects White workers positively and significantly, the effect on Black workers is larger, and for Hispanic workers it is not statistically different from zero. These results are robust when considering unconventional monetary policy measures in the specification, and when exploring the impact of monetary policy on different genders and age groups. We also highlight how recession affects the transmission channel of monetary policy to the labor market for White and Hispanic workers. Finally, further extensions suggest that the Fed’s monetary policy is effective in reducing the racial unemployment gap, particularly between Whites and Blacks, and during economic booms.     

The impact of monetary policy in the midst of big shocks

This paper studies the impact of Federal Reserve policies that created the largest deviations from price stability during the Fed׳s first 100 years: the post-World War I deflation, the deflation of the Great Depression, the inflation of World War II, and the Great Inflation of the 1970s. In terms of their macroeconomic impacts, I find that deflation was uniquely depressing in the 1930s because of cartel policies that prevented nominal prices and wages from adjusting to clear markets, and not because deflation is generically depressing. I find that the biggest impact of monetary policy during World War II was in debasing debt through inflation. I find that the main drivers of the 1970s economy were long-run changes in productivity and the labor market, and that there may have been little that the Fed could have done at this time to expand employment and output. More broadly, I find that macroeconomic performance would have been better over the Fed׳s first century had the Fed followed a monetary policy to deliver stable prices.     

Forward guidance – what does it mean and will it work?

The Bank of England has introduced ‘state‐contingent threshold guidance’, stating that it will not consider tightening monetary policy until the ILO unemployment rate has fallen below 7%. This is a similar policy to that adopted by the Fed in the US and represents an attempt to better manage the expectations of households, firms and financial markets about future changes in monetary policy.…     

Fed Credit Policy: What is a Lender of Last Resort?

Discussions of the Fed׳s financial crisis lending – and its role as “Lender of Last Resort” more generally – often overlook the distinction between monetary policy and credit policy. Central bank actions constitute monetary policy if they alter the quantity of the bank׳s monetary liabilities, but constitute credit policy if they alter the composition of the bank׳s portfolio without affecting the outstanding amount of monetary liabilities. In the 19th century, Henry Thornton and Walter Bagehot advocated Lender of Last Resort policies as a means of expanding the money supply when the demand for money surged in a crisis. In contrast, the Fed׳s recent crisis lending for the most part left its outstanding monetary liabilities unaffected, and thus represented credit policy, not Lender of Last Resort activity. Credit allocation in a crisis is potentially costly because it affects market participants׳ beliefs about the likelihood of future central bank rescues, which in turn reduces their incentive to protect themselves against financial distress and thus exacerbates financial instability. Credible limits on credit policy thus are critical to central banks׳ core policy mission. One path to establishing such limits is to create “living wills” that detail how to resolve large, complex financial firms without government support.     

Monetary policy on twitter and asset prices: Evidence from computational text analysis

In this paper, we dissect the Twitter debate about the future course of monetary policy and trace the effects of selected topics of this discourse on U.S. asset prices. We focus on the “taper tantrum” episode in 2013, a period with large revisions in expectations about future Fed policy. Based on a novel data set of 90,000 Twitter messages (“tweets”) covering the debate of Fed tapering on Twitter, we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a computational text analysis tool, to quantify the content of the discussion. Several estimated topic frequencies are then included in a VAR model to estimate the effects of topic shocks on asset prices. We find that the discussion about Fed policy on social media contains price-relevant information. Shocks to the discussion about the timing of the tapering, about the broader economic policy context and worrying investors are shown to lead to significant asset price changes. We also show that the effects are mostly due to changes in the term premium of yields consistent with the portfolio balance channel of unconventional monetary policy.     

What Would Milton Friedman Have Thought of the Great Recession?

Milton Friedman died in 2006 , right before the onset of the Great Recession. Unfortunately, we will never know how Friedman would have interpreted this event. However, we can draw some inferences from his published views on the Great Depression, as well as his views on more recent monetary policy, especially in Japan. It seems likely that Friedman would have blamed the Fed for insufficiently expansionary monetary policy during 2008 and 2009, a view that is quite different from the conventional conservative interpretation of events.     

The role of liquid government bonds in the great transformation of American monetary policy

A fundamental shift in monetary policy occurred around 1980: the Fed went from a “passive” policy to an “active” policy. We study a model in which government bonds provide transactions services. We present two calibrations of our model, using pre- and post-1980 data. We show that estimates of pre- and post-1980 policy rules all lie within our determinacy regions. But, the pre-1980 policy was a very bad monetary policy, even if it avoided sunspot equilibria. Model simulations suggest that household welfare would have increased by 3.3 percent of permanent consumption in this period under an active policy.     

The political economy of exchange rate regime determination: Theory and evidence

This paper studies exchange rate regime choice from a positive perspective by modeling the interplay of monetary and fiscal policy, credibility and financial market microstructure as factors influencing the decision on de facto regime. The model shows how a small open economy reliant on foreign sources of financing is likely to opt for a stable regime. Furthermore, a stable political environment with a high degree of accountability is conducive to choosing a flexible regime. The findings suggest that flexible rather than fixed exchange rate regimes provide more fiscal discipline.     

Testing the Structural Interpretation of the Price Puzzle with a Cost‐Channel Model*

We estimate a variety of small‐scale new‐Keynesian DSGE models with the cost channel to assess their ability to replicate the ‘price puzzle’, i.e. the inflationary impact of a monetary policy shock typically arising in vector autoregression (VAR) analysis. To correctly identify the monetary policy shock, we distinguish between a standard policy rate shifter and a shock to ‘trend inflation’, i.e. the time‐varying inflation target set by the Fed. Our estimated models predict a negative inflation reaction to a monetary policy tightening. We offer a discussion of the possible sources of mismatch between the VAR evidence and our own.     

Unconventional monetary policy and the stock market’s reaction to Federal Reserve policy actions

We examine the change in the effect of Federal Reserve’s policy actions on stock returns after the Fed started to use unconventional policy actions. We find that the response of stock returns to monetary policy actions are almost seven times higher after the federal funds rate hit the zero lower bound. We conduct additional analysis to examine the underlying causes of the increase in the impact of monetary policy actions of stock returns. We show that investors rebalance their portfolios towards equity after selling Treasury securities to the Federal Reserve during large scale asset purchases.     

USA

The Federal Reserve, having failed in its attempts to persuade either the Japanese or West German governments to adopt a more expansionary stance, has persisted in its policy of monetary relaxation as a means of boosting domestic: demand and, by way of a lower dollar, improving US competitiveness. In spite of a monetary overshoot, interest rates have been cut repeatedly this year and the current level of the discount rate is the lowest in nearly a decade. The tightening of fiscal policy, which Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker insisted was a pre-requisite of monetary easing, remains elusive. As the "automaticity" element of Gramm-Rudman has been declared unconstitutional, the onus for cutting the budget deficit is once more back on Congress. And while little progress is made on reducing domestic absorption, the trade and current account deficits continue to set new records.     

DSGE forecasts of the lost recovery

The years following the Great Recession were challenging for forecasters. Unlike other deep downturns, this recession was not followed by a swift recovery, but instead generated a sizable and persistent output gap that was not accompanied by deflation as a traditional Phillips curve relationship would have predicted. Moreover, the zero lower bound and unconventional monetary policy generated an unprecedented policy environment. We document the actual real-time forecasting performance of the New York Fed dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model during this period and explain the results using the pseudo real-time forecasting performance results from a battery of DSGE models. We find the New York Fed DSGE model’s forecasting accuracy to be comparable to that of private forecasters, and notably better for output growth than the median forecasts from the FOMC’s Summary of Economic Projections. The model’s financial frictions were key in obtaining these results, as they implied a slow recovery following the financial crisis.     

Political Macroeconomics: A Survey of Recent Developments

The paper surveys political macroeconomics, covering its development from Rogoff's conservative central banker to the most recent discussions of monetary policy and institutional design. Topics include the inflation-stabilization trade-off, central bank independence with escape clauses and overruling with costs, inflation targets, performance contracts for monetary authorities, and the consequences of output persistence for these issues. Further topics are the political business cycle when output is persistent, the political macroeconomics of fiscal policy, the government spending bias, and the game-theoretic interaction between fiscal and monetary policy. All work is discussed within a coherent analytical framework.     

Intelligible factors for the yield curve

We construct a factor model of the yield curve and specify time series processes for these factors, so that the innovations are mutually orthogonal. At the same time, the factors are such that they assume clear, intuitive interpretations. The resulting “intelligible factors” should prove useful for investment professionals to discuss expectations about yield curves and the implied dynamics. Moreover, they allow us to distinguish announced changes of the monetary policy stance versus monetary policy surprises, which we find to be rare. We identify two such events, namely September 11, 2001, and the Fed reaction to the sub-prime crisis of 2007.     

Intraday effect of news on emerging European forex markets: An event study analysis

We analyze the impact of euro zone/German and U.S. macroeconomic news announcements and the communication of the monetary policy settings of the ECB and the Fed on the forex markets of new EU members. We employ an event study methodology to analyze intraday data from 2011–2015. Our comprehensive analysis of the wide variety of macroeconomic information during the post-GFC period shows that: (i) macroeconomic announcements affect the value of the new EU country exchange rates, (ii) the origin of the announcement matters, (iii) the type of announcement matters, (iv) different types of news (good, bad or neutral) result in different reactions, (v) markets react not only after the news release but also before, (vi) when the U.S. dollar is the base currency the impact of the news is larger than in the case of the euro, (vii) announcements on ECB monetary policy result in stronger effects than those of the Fed, (viii) temporary inefficiencies are present in new EU country forex markets, (ix) new EU country exchange rates react differently to positive US news during the EU debt crisis compared to the rest of the period.     

The fiscal and monetary response to COVID‐19: What the Great Depression has – and hasn't – taught us

Although some regard the New Deal of the 1930s as exemplifying an aggressive fiscal and monetary response to a severe economic crisis, the US fiscal and monetary policy responses to the COVID‐19 crisis have actually been far more substantial – and, so far, much more effective in reviving aggregate spending. Although many fear that these responses, and the large‐scale increase in bank reserves especially, must eventually cause unwanted inflation, the concurrent sharp decline in money's velocity has thus far more than offset any inflationary effects of money growth, while forward bond prices reflect a general belief that inflation will remain below 2 per cent for at least another decade. Notwithstanding the growth of the Fed's balance sheet, Fed authorities can always check inflation by sufficiently raising the interest return on bank reserves. Nonetheless, recent developments have heightened the risk of ‘fiscal dominance’ of monetary policy at some point in the future.     

Least squares learning and the US Treasury bill rate

Understanding how agents formulate their expectations about Fed behavior is important for market participants because they can potentially use this information to make more accurate estimates of stock and bond prices. Although it is commonly assumed that agents learn over time, there is scant empirical evidence in support of this assumption. Thus, in this paper we test if the forecast of the three month T-bill rate in the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) is consistent with least squares learning when there are discrete shifts in monetary policy. We first derive the mean, variance and autocovariances of the forecast errors from a recursive least squares learning algorithm when there are breaks in the structure of the model. We then apply the Bai and Perron (1998) test for structural change to a forecasting model for the three month T-bill rate in order to identify changes in monetary policy. Having identified the policy regimes, we then estimate the implied biases in the interest rate forecasts within each regime. We find that when the forecast errors from the SPF are corrected for the biases due to shifts in policy, the forecasts are consistent with least squares learning.