How Monetary Policy Works

Provides an in-depth overview of the Federal Reserve System, including information about monetary policy and the economy, the Federal Reserve in the international sphere, supervision and regulation, consumer and community affairs and services offered by Reserve Banks. Contains several appendixes, including a brief explanation of Federal Reserve regulations, a glossary of terms, and a list of additional publications.

For monetary policymakers worldwide, developing a practical understanding of how monetary policy transmits to the economy is a day-to-day challenge. The data such policymakers have is imperfect, the maps they use are continually redrawn. With such uncertainty, understanding this complicated issue is rarely straightforward. This book, a collaboration between some of the finest minds working on monetary theory in the world, helps to provide a foundation for understanding monetary policy in all its complex glory. Using models, case studies and new empirical evidence, the contributors to this book help readers on many levels develop their technical expertise. Students of macroeconomics, money and banking and international finance will find this to be a good addition to their reading lists. At the same time, policymakers and professionals within banking will learn valuable lessons from a thorough read of this book's pages.

How should governments and central banks use monetary policy to create a healthy economy? Traditionally, policymakers have used such strategies as controlling the growth of the money supply or pegging the exchange rate to a stable currency. In recent years a promising new approach has emerged: publicly announcing and pursuing specific targets for the rate of inflation. This book is the first in-depth study of inflation targeting. Combining penetrating theoretical analysis with detailed empirical studies of countries where inflation targeting has been adopted, the authors show that the strategy has clear advantages over traditional policies. They argue that the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank should adopt this strategy, and they make specific proposals for doing so. The book begins by explaining the unique features and advantages of inflation targeting. The authors argue that the simplicity and openness of inflation targeting make it far easier for the public to understand the intent and effects of monetary policy. This strategy also increases policymakers' accountability for inflation performance and can accommodate flexible, even "discretionary," monetary policy actions without sacrificing central banks' credibility. The authors examine how well variants of this approach have worked in nine countries: Germany and Switzerland (which employ a money-focused form of inflation targeting), New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Israel, Spain, and Australia. They show that these countries have typically seen lower inflation, lower inflation expectations, and lower nominal interest rates, and have found that one-time shocks to the price level have less of a "pass-through" effect on inflation. These effects, in turn, are improving the climate for economic growth. The authors warn, however, that the success of inflation targeting depends on operational details, such as how the targets are defined and when they are announced. They also show that inflation targeting is not a panacea that can make inflation perfectly predictable or reduce it without economic costs. Clear, balanced, and authoritative, Inflation Targeting is a groundbreaking study that will have a major impact on the debate over the right monetary strategy for the coming decades. As a unique comparative study of what central banks actually do in different countries around the world, this book will also be invaluable to anyone interested in how economic policy is made.

This timely volume presents the latest thinking on the monetary policy rules and seeks to determine just what types of rules and policy guidelines function best. A unique cooperative research effort that allowed contributors to evaluate different policy rules using their own specific approaches, this collection presents their striking findings on the potential response of interest rates to an array of variables, including alterations in the rates of inflation, unemployment, and exchange. Monetary Policy Rules illustrates that simple policy rules are more robust and more efficient than complex rules with multiple variables. A state-of-the-art appraisal of the fundamental issues facing the Federal Reserve Board and other central banks, Monetary Policy Rules is essential reading for economic analysts and policymakers alike.

As the Federal Reserve System conducts its latest review of the strategies, tools, and communication practices it deploys to pursue its dual-mandate goals of maximum employment and price stability, Strategies for Monetary Policy—drawn from the 2019 Monetary Policy Conference at the Hoover Institution—emerges as an especially timely volume. The book's expert contributors examine key policy issues, offering their perspectives on US monetary policy tools and instruments and the interaction between Fed policies and financial markets. The contributors review central bank inflation-targeting policies, how various monetary strategies actually work in practice, and the use of nominal GDP targeting as a way to get the credit market to work well and fix the friction in that market. In addition, they discuss the effects of the various rules that the Fed considers in setting policy, how the Fed's excessive fine-tuning of the economy and financial markets has added financial market volatility and harmed economic performance, and the key issues that impact achievement of the Fed's 2 percent inflation objective. The volume concludes by exploring potential options for enhancing our policy approach.

In The Structural Foundations of Monetary Policy, Michael D. Bordo, John H. Cochrane, and Amit Seru bring together discussions and presentations from the Hoover Institution's annual monetary policy conference. The conference participants discuss long-run monetary issues facing the world economy, with an emphasis on deep, unresolved structural questions. They explore vital issues affecting the Federal Reserve, the United States' central bank. They voice concern over the Fed's independence, governance, and ability to withstand future shocks and analyze the effects of its monetary policies and growing balance sheet in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The authors ask a range of questions that get to the heart of twenty-first-century monetary policy. Finally they propose reforms to ensure that the Fed will remain independent, stable, strong, and resilient in an unpredictable world.

This new volume sheds new light on current monetary issues, in particular the debate on monetary policy making, by blending theoretical economic analysis, history of economics, and historical case studies. A discretionary monetary policy refers to cases in which the central bank is free to change its policy actions or key instruments when the need arises, whilst a monetary policy rule can be defined as a commitment from (independent) central banks to reach one or several objective(s) by way of systematic policy actions. This book uses case studies from France and Sweden, and places them in the context of Keynes’ argument from his 1923 ‘Tract on Monetary Reforms’, to support the argument that the use of discretionary practices within a monetary policy rule (such as in the Gold Standard era) is the best approach. This book takes an innovative approach in combining a theoretical analysis (mainly the work of New Neoclassical Synthesis throughout Woodford's model) a history of economic thought analysis (based on the monetary works from Wicksell, Cassel and Keynes) and an historical study of central bank practices both in France (based on Bank of France archives materials) and in Sweden. The final section of the book explores the debate on monetary policy rule in light of the 2008 financial crisis. As such, the book provides a unique synthesis that will be of interest not only to scholars of history of economic thought and economic theory, but also to anyone with an interest in monetary economics and contemporary monetary policy.