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The article offers information regarding the monetary policy in Japan. Topics include the difference between the bond markets of the country with the U.S. wherein a total of 95 percent government bonds in the country was domestically owned by the nation, the importance of including assets of U.S. Federal Reserve and Bank of Japan in the estimation of interest rates, and the extension of monetary policy to macroeconomic and financial stability.

The Federal Reserve's mandate has evolved considerably over the organization's hundred-year history. It was changed from an initial focus in 1913 on financial stability, to fiscal financing in World War II and its aftermath, to a strong anti-inflation focus from the late 1970s, and then back to greater emphasis on financial stability since the Great Contraction. Yet, as the Fed's mandate has expanded in recent years, its range of instruments has narrowed, partly based on a misguided belief in the inherent stability of financial markets. We argue for a return to multiple instruments, including a more active role for reserve requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper it was studied the cyclical and structural convergence between Romanian and Euro Zone''s economies in a Minnesota Priors framework. For this purpose we called the Bayesian econometrics to estimate a Structural Vector Autoregression model SVAR with Gibbs Sampling. The methodological framework called in this paper is proposed by experts from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minnesota and from here the name of Minnesota Prior where a priori were introduced the hypothesis that endogenous variables follow different forms of a Markov first order autoregressive model, namely a Random Walk or an AR model. Focusing here especially on consumption cycles and using the relations provided by the theory, I was intended in study the asymmetries between supply and demand shocks in the case of Romanian and Euro Area economies. A higher correlation of shocks between the two studied economies indicates a structural similarity. In addition, for this purpose I involved several methods to ensure robustness checks in regard with the correlation of the two types of structural shocks. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: When the Federal Reserve was established by the US Congress in 1913, its charter mandated that the new central bank “promote an elastic currency” and the institution was given extraordinary powers to serve as a lender of last resort to the banking system. Congress was reacting to the cycle of financial panics that had beset the country since the Civil War and had worsened with the Panic of 1907. Congress sought to find a remedy to prevent runs on banks turning into full-fledged financial crises. The term “elastic” in the opening words of the charter was intended to underscore the need for a robust banking system that could withstand shocks and not collapse upon itself. There was no mention whatsoever of a dual mandate of promoting price stability and encouraging full employment. With prodding from the US Congress, the Federal Reserve became highly involved in the management of the economy of the United States after WWII, focusing on inflation and full employment objectives. In 1993 Professor John Taylor set forth an elegant and simple framework (aka, the Taylor Rule) for analyzing the interest rate policy of the Federal Reserve in terms of its dual mandate. This paper examines Federal Reserve behavior from the mid-1950s to 2011 through the lens of the Taylor Rule. Our contribution is to use a dynamic linear model with Bayesian inference to update the evolution through time of the key parameters surrounding the inflation and full employment mandates, using only the information available to the Federal Reserve at each point in time. Our findings provide a more nuanced quantitative view than is previously available in the literature of how the Federal Reserve shifted its management of its dual mandate over time and in response to different economic challenges. Moreover, our research leads to serious questions of how Federal Reserve decision making may change in the future, following the financial panic of 2008, pointing toward numerous avenues for new research. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Drawing from the personal tape recordings made during the presidency of Richard Nixon, we uncover and report in this paper new evidence that Nixon manipulated Arthur Burns and the Federal Reserve Bank into creating a political business cycle that helped secure Nixon's reelection victory in 1972. Nixon understood the risks that his desired monetary policy imposed but chose to trade longer-term economic costs to the economy for his own short-term political benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a reappraisal of the international origins of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The most comprehensive study on the subject up to date is a book by J. Lawrence Broz. While Broz is correct to emphasize the impact of international trends in shaping the final text of the act, his account remains incomplete. The primary reason for this is that the narrative cannot account for the following puzzle: Why would Wall Street bankers fight vehemently during the fall of 1913 (an unimportant, "black box" period in Broz's account) against a proposal that was supposed to be in their best interest? A possible explanation should focus on President Wilson's policy entrepreneurship and strategic policy vision - both foreign and domestic . This paper demonstrates that the introduction of an autonomous presidency to the verbal model goes a long way toward explicating the puzzles that occurred during the "black box" period left out of Broz's narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper examines the interaction between monetary policy and financial stability and provides an assessment of the implications of banks’ risk management practices for monetary policy. By considering the desire of the central bank to stabilize different types of the “basis” risk as a contribution to financial stability, we derive a set of plausible interest-rate rules characterized by either backward or forward interest-rate smoothing. The paper investigates the determinacy conditions of the rational expectations equilibria obtained under such rules. Contrary to what previously found in the literature, we find that the practice of smoothing interest rates backward does not in general alleviate problems of equilibrium indeterminacy. Moreover, basis risk stabilization may lead to policy rules embedding “forward” interest-rate smoothing, where a new kind of indeterminacy may arise following excessive concern for financial stability. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article reports on monetary policy and comments on the paper "Computable General Equilibrium Models and Monetary Policy Advice" by David E. Altig, Charles T. Carlstrom, and Kevin J. Lansing. Altig and his colleagues attempt to combine modern macroeconomic models with policy evaluation with their model covering the interpretation of time series data in private and policy behavior, its cohesion with the data, and its description of policy behavior allows for policy experiments resembling policy choices.

The article discusses liquidity effects and comments on the paper "Liquidity Effects and Transactions Technologies" by Michael Dotsey and Peter Ireland. Liquidity effects are commonly short term and exaggerated in research models where cash-in-advance constraints cause people to save. This plays a role in short-term forecasting which is what Federal Reserve Banks are responsible for. Empirical research on the liquidity effect has determined that nominal interest rates drop when there's been a monetary injection.

Rational expectations is a key aspect of financial asset pricing theory. To the extent that the MMS survey accurately reflects expectations, evidence in this paper does not support this assumption, indicating that the economists' forecasts are biased and only marginally outperform random walk forecasts. However, the survey forecasts incorporate the information contained in out-of-sample time series forecasts and their accuracy increases for maintenance periods in which the discount rate was changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship between monetary base and money supply. Money supply is defined as the amount of circulating paper money and other currency as well as the demand deposits held by commercial banks. Monetary base is the Federal Reserve credit, which is composed of member bank balances, plus the currency held by the public and commercial banks. Banks depend on their reserve funds to provide the financial services that they offer and this is affected by the Federal Reserve's monetary policy.

Patric Hendershott has attempted to "separate discretionary or exogenous changes in the money stock from automatic or induced changes" [4, p. 4] in order to obtain an unbiased measure of the policy actions of the monetary authorities. According to Hendershott, the exogenous component of the money stock is "neutral" if the impact of business activity on the money stock has been removed. Therefore, if the neutralization procedure is effective, one should find evidence of unidirectional causality running from NMS and MODNMS to business activity, without feedback. A test for unidirectional causality recently proposed by Christopher Sims was employed to determine the causal relationship between GNP and Hendershott's two measures of the exogenous component of the money stock. The empirical findings do not indicate a causal pattern running consistently from either NMS and MODNMS to GNP. In sum, our findings indicate that Hendershott's measures of the exogenous component of the money supply are not truly "exogenous." The difficulties associated with the NMS indicators arise from inherent weaknesses in the procedures employed to extract the exogenous component. As Bowers and Duro [2] have shown, Hendershott's MODNMS may be very closely approximated by removing (via regression analysis) the variation in the money supply attributable to movements in Industrial Production. Suppose, however, that the monetary authorities respond in a timely manner to offset cyclical peaks and troughs. In this case, the exogenous or policy induced component of the money stock would be perfectly and negatively correlated with Industrial Production. If the procedure used by Bowers and Duro is followed to obtain a measure of the Neutralized Money Stock, however, the exogenous component is erroneously taken to be endogenous. Thus, when monetary is exactly contracyclical, the endogenous component is overestimated? Such problems call into question the usefulness of so-called neutralized measu... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on the paper "Scale Economies, Costs Efficiencies, and Technological Change in Federal Reserve Payments Processing," by Paul W. Bauer and Gary D. Ferrier, published in the November 2, 1996 issue of "The Journal of Money, Credit and Banking." He states that the researchers estimate cost functions for three payment services that the U.S. Federal Reserve Banks produce and sell: automated clearinghouse services, check processing, and wire transfers (Fedwire). He mentions that the researchers had an advantage over other researchers in that they have access to the Federal Reserve's Planning and Control Systems data set, which researchers outside of the Federal Reserve are unable to access.

In 1992 the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston conducted an analysis that examined the effects of race on mortgage lending in the Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area. Collecting data on all the possibly relevant information used in the lending process, they find when controlling for a subset of this information that race has a statistically significant effect on the decision to reject a mortgage application. Other researchers, using the same dataset, have shown that analysis of alternative subsets of the variables significantly reduces the effects of race. While theory should guide variable selection, there is often no unique theory to explain social science. In such cases, uncertainty in model specification causes one to be uncertain as to the true effects of the variables of interest. This paper accounts for the effects of model uncertainty by using Bayesian model averaging and finds a reduced effect of race and weakened evidence concerning the statistical significance of the effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ted Balbach served as research director at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis from 1975 to 1992. This paper lauds his contributions during that time, including the expanded influence of the Review, enhanced databases and data publications, and a visiting scholar program that attracted leading economists from around the world. Balbach is remembered fondly as a visionary leader and gracious mentor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Federal Reserve System's 2007 Community Development Research Conference "Financing Community Development: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future," was held in Washington , D.C., on March 29-30, 2007. This conference was the fifth in a biennial series that the Federal Reserve System established in 1999. The responsibility for organizing the conference program rotates among the Federal Reserves Banks. The staffs of the Federal Reserves Bank of Philadelphia's Community Affairs Department and Research Department took the lead in organizing the 2007 program. The intention of the conference series is to encourage the application of rigorous economic analysis to issues related to community development because without such state-of -the-art research, policymakers cannot hope to devise effective economics development policies and programs. In this article, Loretta Mester provides a summary of the conference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper briefly examines the evolution of economic doctrine used to justify monetary policies at the Federal Reserve since World War II. The main finding is that while individual doctrines rarely withstand close scrutiny, they do change with some regularity and in evident response to circumstance. The ability to shift the public face (and perhaps the private basis) of monetary decision making gives the Federal Reserve, for all its faults, an advantage over the European Central Bank, which is constitutionally committed to its "line"—and therefore unable to accommodate itself to new evidence, new theory, or new states of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the discount policy in the light of recent experience. The accord of March 1951, U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve officials agreed that the Federal Reserve would lower or stop purchases of short-term securities and allow the short-term market to adapt to a position at which banks would depend upon borrowing at the Federal Reserve to create necessary adjustments in their reserves. This contemplated a level of short-term interest rates which, in response to market situations, would fluctuate around the Federal Reserve discount rate.

The article focuses on the sales of government securities to federal reserve banks under repurchase agreement. The author asserts that expansion of the U.S. national debt requires the U.S. Federal Reserve to re-examine ways of conduction open-market operations. The author notes the extensive use of repurchase agreements with dealers in government securities during previous years, a reappearance of a practice predating the Great Depression. He claims the reappearance is noteworthy because the open-market operations are more important in the 1950s than in the 1920s. Monetary authorities see these transactions, according to the author, as releasing them from money market responsibility without giving the appearance of using their open-market powers to control the price of government securities.

The United States Mint recently conducted a coin attrition study designed to estimate the rate at which coins are withdrawn from circulation in order to better plan coin production. This paper reports on the analysis of a large sample of coins taken from the United States Federal Reserve Bank cash offices used to estimate coin attrition rates by denomination. The dollar value of the circulating stock of coin available to serve the needs of commerce is estimated to be $11.8 billion (#7.6 billion). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. Federal Reserve System (Fed) has a unique regional structure, one with a large amount of autonomy and authority for its twelve regional district banks. In this paper we briefly review the history behind establishment of this structure in 1913, and address the question, “Does this unchanged regional structure of the Fed make sense today?” Three criteria are used to assess the appropriateness of the regional structure: 1) proportionality of representation in monetary policy decisions, 2) the functional economic nature of Fed district boundaries, and 3) the quality of regional economic reporting by regional district banks. After finding substantial shortcomings in all areas, we propose a more modern set of district boundaries, which improves proportionality of representation, recaptures the functional economic character of Fed districts, while maintaining the possibility of meaningful district-wide regional economic reporting and analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the model developed by John Taylor which illustrated how the United States Federal Reserve Bank System affect the federal funds rate. Functions of federal reserve banks for depository institutions; Implications of Taylor's model on the daily management of Federal bank reserves; Evaluation of the Trading Desk reaction function used by Taylor to describe the Desk operations of the Federal Reserve.

Reports developments related to the Federal Reserve Systems in the United States as of September 2000. Accounts on Federal Open Market Committee's decision to maintain the existing monetary policy; Names of appointed chairmen and deputy chairmen of the Federal Reserve Banks for 2001; Issuance of guidance on managing risk in banking by the Basel Committee.

The $1 billion open‐market operation conducted by the Federal Reserve, at the height of the Great Depression, was a successful precedent to the recent Quantitative Easing (QE) programs. The 1932 program entailed large purchases of medium‐ and long‐term securities over a 4‐month period. An event study analysis indicates that the program dramatically lowered medium‐ and long‐term Treasury yields. A segmented markets model is used to analyze the effects of the open‐market purchases on the economy. A significant degree of financial market segmentation is estimated, and partly explains the observed upturn in output growth. Had the Federal Reserve continued its operations and used the announcement strategy used in QE1, the Great Contraction could have been attenuated earlier. Our historical analysis suggests that the Federal Reserve in 2008 had a good predecessor to its actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US banking system has experienced stress in 2023 with four regional banks failing and the Federal Reserve hiking interest rates. The latest challenge is potential defaults from commercial real estate, since the pandemic has normalized remote work in large cities. Will banks kick this can down the road or are some willing to take the hit now, betting on smaller losses a few years from now? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides a guideline to tables presented in the paper. Includes table on reserves, money stock and debt measures; Reserves of depository institutions and reserve bank credit; Reserves and borrowings of depository institutions; Interest rates of federal reserve banks; Data on federal reserve open market transactions; Condition and federal reserve note statements of federal reserve banks.

ABSTRACT: Between 1934 and 1974, the Federal Reserve changed the initial margin requirement for the U.S. stock market 22 times. I use this variation to show that investors' leverage constraints affect the pricing of risk. Consistent with earlier theoretical predictions, I find that tighter leverage constraints result in a flatter relation between betas and expected returns. My results provide strong empirical support for the idea that the constraints investors face may help explain the empirical failure of the capital asset pricing model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Established by a three person committee in 1914, the structure of the Federal Reserve System has remained essentially unchanged ever since, despite criticism at the time and over ensuing decades. This paper examines the original selection of cities for Reserve Banks and branches, and placement of district boundaries. We show that each aspect of the Fed's structure reflected the preferences of national banks, including adjustments to district boundaries after 1914. Further, using newly-collected data on interbank connections, we find that banker preferences mirrored established correspondent relationships. The Federal Reserve was thus formed on top of the structure that it was largely meant to replace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper measures the effect on the federal funds rate of an open-market operation. The paper deals with simultaneous-equations bias by developing a proxy for the errors the Federal Reserve makes in forecasting the extent to which Treasury operations will add or drain reserves available to private banks. These errors induce fluctuations in bank reserves which have measurable consequences for the federal funds rate. The paper estimates that a reduction in nonborrowed for the federal funds rate. The paper estimates that a reduction in nonborrowed reserves of $30 million, if sustained for an entire 14-day reserve maintenance period, will cause the federal funds rate to rise by 10 basis points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports overwhelming evidence against the hypothesis that the federal funds rate follows a martingale over the 2-week reserve maintenance period, establishing that banks do not regard reserves held on different days of the week to be perfect substitutes. A theoretical model of the federal funds market is proposed that could account for these empirical regularities as the result of line limits, transaction costs, and weekend accounting conventions. The paper concludes that such transaction costs lie at the heart of the liquidity effect that enables the Federal Reserve to change the interest rate on a daily basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on monetary services indexes (MSI). Difference of MSI with monetary aggregates; Account on the monetary aggregates published by the Federal Reserve Board; Methodology used for measuring MSI.

Prior to the present decade, the deficiencies of the financial system gave rise to uneconomical lending terms and to excessive rates of interest on home loans. The pronounced and continued upward sweep of the secular trend during the twenties deferred the inevitable consequences, but the ensuing crisis brought the shortcomings into sharp focus. The repercussions were national in scope and set into action various measures of reform to give relief to home owners. This paper presents a summary of the activities of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, the Federal Savings and Loan System, and the Federal Housing Administration. The influence of these agencies on interest rates is discussed, followed by an analysis of the justification of the existing rate level. It is shown that present rates are no longer the result of free market activity but are governed primarily by the rate established on FHA insured loans. There is now some question of the adequacy of rates to cover the attending costs of home-financing institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]