Closing the Monetary Policy Curriculum Gap: A Primer for Educators Making the Transition to Teaching the Fed's Ample-Reserves Framework

FEDS Notes ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (2789) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Ihrig ◽  
◽  
Scott Wolla ◽  

The Federal Reserve (the Fed), the central bank of the United States, has a Congressional mandate to promote maximum employment and price stability. While those goals were articulated in 1977, the approach and tools used to implement those objectives have changed over time.

1994 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Woolley

ABSTRACTThe Federal Reserve Bank of the United States is a pre-eminent banking institution, and an institution that has been subject to scrutiny from a wide variety of scholarly perspectives. The object of this article is to review prominent works dealing with the politics of the Federal Reserve, particularly its relations with other institutions and their effects on monetary policy. The review shows that the formal legal independence of a central bank such as the Fed does not mark the end of monetary politics, and its record suggests a greater measure of modesty and caution on the part of enthusiasts for independent central banks.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
George C. Nurisso ◽  
Edward Simpson Prescott

This article traces the origin of too-big-to-fail policy in modern US banking to the bailout of the $1.2b Bank of the Commonwealth in 1972. It describes this bailout and those of subsequent banks through that of Continental Illinois in 1984. During this period, market concentration due to interstate banking restrictions is a factor in most of the bailouts and systemic risk concerns were raised to justify the bailouts of surprisingly small banks. Finally, most of the bailouts in this period relied on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's use of the Essentiality Doctrine and Federal Reserve lending. A discussion of this doctrine is used to illustrate how legal constraints on regulators may become less constraining over time.


Author(s):  
Laurence Seidman

Stimulus without debt is a policy that would increase aggregate demand for goods and services in a recession without increasing government debt. Stimulus without debt consists of a transfer (not loan) from the central bank to the national treasury (or to national treasuries in the case of the eurozone) so that the treasury does not have to borrow to finance fiscal stimulus enacted by the legislature. In the United States, Congress would enact a fiscal stimulus package that consists mainly of cash tax rebates to households but also other temporary expenditures and temporary tax cuts; the fiscal stimulus would raise aggregate demand. The Federal Reserve would use new money to give a large transfer (not loan) to the Treasury equal to the fiscal stimulus package so that the Treasury does not have to borrow to pay for the package. Hence, there would be no increase in government debt.


2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 177-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kazuo Ueda

As the U.S. economy works through a sluggish recovery several years after the Great Recession technically came to an end in June 2009, it can only look with horror toward Japan's experience of two decades of stagnant growth since the early 1990s. In contrast to Japan, U.S. policy authorities responded to the financial crisis since 2007 more quickly. Surely, they learned from Japan's experience. I will begin by describing how Japan's economic situation unfolded in the early 1990s and offering some comparisons with how the Great Recession unfolded in the U.S. economy. I then turn to the Bank of Japan's policy responses to the crisis and again offer some comparisons to the Federal Reserve. I will discuss the use of both the conventional interest rate tool—the federal funds rate in the United States, and the “call rate” in Japan—and nonconventional measures of monetary policy and consider their effectiveness in the context of the rest of the financial system.


2002 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 115-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Ball ◽  
N. Gregory Mankiw

This paper discusses the NAIRU—the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment. It first considers the role of the NAIRU concept in business cycle theory, arguing that this concept is implicit in any model in which monetary policy influences both inflation and unemployment. The exact value of the NAIRU is hard to measure, however, in part because it changes over time. The paper then discusses why the NAIRU changes and, in particular, why it fell in the United States during the 1990s. The most promising hypothesis is that the decline in the NAIRU is attributable to the acceleration in productivity growth.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (3 (2017)) ◽  
pp. 341-364
Author(s):  
Oleksandr Dzyublyuk

The preconditions, causes and peculiarities of the global financial and economic crisis created the basis for the withdrawal of central banks from their traditional limited range of instruments of monetary influence on the economy and the transition to the active use of unconventional monetary policy measures. The Federal Reserve was the first central bank which used the unconventional measures of monetary policy as a key factor in overcoming the recession and bringing the US economy to a sustainable growth path. The traditional instruments of monetary regulation during the period of aggravation of financial crisis on the money markets turned out complete ineffective, that had the destructive consequences for the economy. That is why so important is the analysis of the reasons for this ineffectiveness and the necessity of use of unconventional instruments. The practical mechanism of using such unconventional instruments of the Fed includes such as large-scale asset purchases and FOMC’s forward guidance about intentions. And it is hard to underestimate the role of these tools in the withdrawal of the American economy from the state of recession. Also important are innovative credit policy programs that have been used by the Federal Reserve during the period of growing crisis, in terms of increasing the effective ness of its impact on the financial stabilization of the banking system, providing markets with liquidity and stimulating domestic demand. The use of unconventional monetary policy instruments aims to achieve a wide range of strategic goals that include not only price stability but also economic growth and low unemployment. Thus, based on the powerful influence of the Fed’s monetary policy on the dynamics of the main economic parameters, it is expedient to apply a dual mandate in formulating the strategic goals of the central bank.


Author(s):  
Alan N. Rechtschaffen

This chapter begins with a discussion of the Federal Reserve and the Federal Reserve Banking System. The Federal Reserve System was created by Congress under the Federal Reserve Act “to provide for the establishment of federal reserve banks, to furnish an elastic currency, to afford means of rediscounting commercial paper, to establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States and for other purposes.” The Federal Reserve System comprises a central Board of Governors appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the Senate, and 12 regional Reserve banks. Monetary policy is set by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). The remainder of the chapter covers monetary policy, quantitative easing, balance sheet normalization and the FOMC minutes.


1961 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 318-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard H. Timberlake

Central banking institutions during the past quarter-century have been almost free of the constraints that inhibited their actions during the nineteenth century. The special conditions under which earlier central banking institutions were formed and operated frequently have been lost to view; and while contemporary observers have come to regard the first two Banks of the United States sympathetically, the functional evolution of these institutions within the framework of specie standards has been largely neglected. The period between the end of the Second Bank and the organization of the Federal Reserve System is subsequently treated as the Dark Ages of monetary policy, better forgotten than deplored.


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