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.
Most central banks oblige depository institutions to hold minimum reserves against their liabilities, predominantly in the form of balances at the central bank. The role of these reserve requirements has evolved significantly over time. The overlay of changing purposes and practices has the result that it is not always fully clear what the current purpose of reserve requirements is, and this necessarily complicates thinking about how a reserve regime should be structured. This paper describes three main purposes for reserve requirements - prudential, monetary control and liquidity management - and suggests best practice for the structure of a reserves regime. Finally, the paper illustrates current practices using a 2010 IMF survey of 121 central banks.
The first of its kind, this book is entirely dedicated to the implementation of monetary policy. Monetary policy implementation has gone through tremendous changes over the last twenty years, which have witnessed the quiet end of 'reserve position doctrine' and the return of an explicit focus on short-term interest rates. Enthusiastically supported by Keynes and later by the monetarist school, reserve position doctrine was developed mainly by US central bankers and academics during the early 1920s, and at least in the US became the unchallenged dogma of monetary policy implementation for sixty years. The return of interest rate targeting also corresponds largely to the restoration of central banking principles established in the late 19th century. Providing a simple theory of monetary policy implementation, Bindseil goes on to explain the role of the three main instruments (open market operations, standing facilities, and reserve requirements) and reviews their use in the twentieth century. In closing, he summarizes current views on efficient monetary policy implementation.
This open access book gives a concise introduction to the practical implementation of monetary policy by modern central banks. It describes the conventional instruments used in advanced economies and the unconventional instruments that have been widely adopted since the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Illuminating the role of central banks in ensuring financial stability and as last resort lenders, it also offers an overview of the international monetary framework. A flow-of-funds framework is used throughout to capture this essential dimension in a consistent and unifying manner, providing a unique and accessible resource on central banking and monetary policy, and its integration with financial stability. Addressed to professionals as well as bachelors and masters students of economics, this book is suitable for a course on economic policy. Useful prerequisites include at least a general idea of the economic institutions of an economy, and knowledge of macroeconomics and monetary economics, but readers need not be familiar with any specific macroeconomic models.
Since 2007, central banks of industrialized countries have counteracted financial instability, recession, and deflationary risks with unprecedented monetary policy operations. While generally regarded as successful, these measures also led to an exceptional increase in the size of central bank balance sheets. The book first introduces the subject by explaining monetary policy operations in normal times, including the key instruments (open market operations, standing facilities, reserve requirements, and the collateral framework). Second, the book reviews the basic mechanics of financial crises as they have hit economies many times. The book then explains what central banks need to do to when financial markets and banks are impaired to fulfil their monetary policy and financial stability mandates. Besides demonstrating the need for non-conventional monetary policy measures, the book also highlights their dangers, such as moral hazard and increased central bank risk taking. The book draws a number of lessons from the crisis on non-conventional monetary policy operations, assessing what measures have worked well, and how a framework should be designed in future normal times such as to contribute to make financial crises less likely. Central bank monetary policy operations have traditionally been considered as a matter of practice, while the macroeconomic modelling of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy is regarded as a discipline relying on substantial theory ('monetary economics'). However, monetary policy operations can equally benefit from a theory, and from a normative framework to guide policy choices. The limited interest that monetary policy operations have found for many decades in academic economics may well have contributed to the many misunderstandings on central bank actions over recent years. This book provides a basis for a better theoretical understanding of real-world monetary policy operations.
This paper explores what history can tell us about the interactions between macroprudential and monetary policy. Based on numerous historical documents, we show that liquidity ratios similar to the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) were commonly used as monetary policy tools by central banks between the 1930s and 1980s. We build a model that rationalizes the mechanisms described by contemporary central bankers, in which an increase in the liquidity ratio has contractionary effects, because it reduces the quantity of assets banks can pledge as collateral. This effect, akin to quantity rationing, is more pronounced when excess reserves are scarce.
This paper presents a rule for foreign exchange interventions (FXI), designed to preserve financial stability in floating exchange rate arrangements. The FXI rule addresses a market failure: the absence of hedging solution for tail exchange rate risk in the market (i.e. high volatility). Market impairment or overshoot of exchange rate between two equilibria could generate high volatility and threaten financial stability due to unhedged exposure to exchange rate risk in the economy. The rule uses the concept of Value at Risk (VaR) to define FXI triggers. While it provides to the market a hedge against tail risk, the rule allows the exchange rate to smoothly adjust to new equilibria. In addition, the rule is budget neutral over the medium term, encourages a prudent risk management in the market, and is more resilient to speculative attacks than other rules, such as fixed-volatility rules. The empirical methodology is backtested on Banco Mexico’s FXIs data between 2008 and 2016.