When I published Floored! last October, I thought I'd said all I could say concerning the adverse consequences of the Fed's then decade-old decision to adopt a "floor"-type operating system. In the new arrangement, the Fed pays interest on bank reserves, and uses changes in the rate…
The Federal Reserve plans to review its inflation growth rate target and potentially select a new monetary policy target. Many Fed officials are in favor of the idea, including Chair Powell. And the latest FOMC minutes show that the Fed’s policy setting committee has discussed new targets….
Last month, in what will presumably be one of his last public speeches before he retires this June, New York Fed President William Dudley defended the Fed's current "floor" system of monetary control against the alternative of a corridor arrangement. Because Dudley's is one of the more…
Forty years ago, in the spring of 1978, I had no intention of becoming an economist. Instead, I was studying marine biology at Duke University's Marine Lab at Pivers Island, on the beautiful North Carolina Coast. There, when the wind was up, my classmate Alan Kahana and…
In the book I advertised in my last post, I argue that the Fed's decision to switch to a "floor"-type operating system "deepened and prolonged the Great Recession." Yet the Fed is only one of several central banks that have adopted floor systems for monetary control during…