The Eurozone crisis represents one of the greatest economic tragedies of the past century. It has caused immense human suffering, which continues to this day. The standard view attributes the economic crisis to an earlier buildup of public and private debt that was augmented by the imposition of...

Despite the Federal Reserve's use of QE programs, the U.S. economy experienced one of the weakest recoveries on record following the Great Recession. Not only was real growth disappointingly low, but even nominal growth over which monetary policy has more control was feeble. Why did QE fail to...

Inflation targeting emerged in the early 1990s and soon became the dominant monetary-policy regime. It provided a much-needed nominal anchor that had been missing since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. Its arrival coincided with a rise in macroeconomic stability for numerous countries,...

Nominal GDP (NGDP) targeting has received a lot of attention over the past decade. This note provides a brief review of the key arguments for NGDP targeting and then presents some practical ways to use it in the conduct of U.S. monetary policy. Specifically, this note shows how to construct...

Can monetary policy influence long-term interest rates? Studies that have tackled this question using VARs generally find that monetary policy's influence on long-term interest rates is small and often statistically insignificant. Other studies, however, using a single-equation approach have...

A series of papers have shown that a monetary regime targeting nominal GDP (NGDP) can reproduce the distribution of risk that would exist if there were widespread use of state-contingent debt securities (Koenig, 2013; Sheedy, 2014; Azariadis et al., 2016, Bullard and DiCecia, 2018). This paper...

The Federal Reserve switched from using a corridor operating system to using a floor operating system in late 2008. By design, a floor system eliminates the opportunity cost to a bank of holding reserves, allowing a central bank to use its balance sheet as an independent tool of monetary policy....

A careful reading of Milton Friedman’s work reveals two principles for achieving financial stability. First, a stable monetary policy would lead to stable nominal income, which would support financial stability. Second, banks and other money-creating institutions should be robust to economic...