Among the different kinds of economic behavior which may account for the familiar Fisherian relationship between nominal interest rates and expected price inflation, portfolio behavior is the most plausibly flexible in the short run. Since substitution into real assets is not a practical...

For expectations of price inflation to affect interest rates, they must affect the behavior of borrowers and lenders or both. This paper analyzes the emergence of the inflation premium in long-term interest rates as the explicit result of borrowers' and lenders' behavior in the bond market in...

What stands out in retrospect about U.S. monetary policy during the Greenspan Era is the ongoing movement away from mechanistic restrictions on the conduct of policy, together with a willingness on occasion to depart even from what more flexible guidelines dictated by contemporary conventional...

The paper next reviews recent evidence on the impact of changes in government debt levels (again, relative to GDP) on interest rates. The recent literature, focusing on expected future debt levels and expected real interest rates, indicates impacts that are large in the context of actual...

Most public discussion of the 1979 Volcker experiment at the time, and likewise most of the subsequent academic literature, emphasized either the role of quantitative targets for money growth (3) or the use of an open market operating procedure based on a reserves quantity rather than a...

Inflation targeting offers the promise of introducing to monetary policy a logic and consistency that some central banks' deliberations sorely missed in the past. At least in today's inherited monetary policymaking context, however, inflation targeting also serves two further objectives that are...

Monetary policy is one of the two principal means (the other being fiscal policy) by which government authorities in a market economy regularly influence the pace and direction of overall economic activity, importantly including not only the level of aggregate output and employment but also the...

Most central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve System, implement their monetary policy by setting interest rates. This paper reviews the major changes that have taken place along the way from the Federal Reserve's interest rate-based policy structure of the 1960s to the interest...

The threat to monetary policy from the electronic revolution in banking is the possibility of a decoupling' of the operations of the central bank from markets in which financial claims are created and transacted in ways that, at some operative margin, affect the decisions of households and firms...

What difference does it make, and for whom, whether the nonperforming debts of emerging market borrowers are restructured? This paper begins by positing a set of counterfactual conditions under which restructuring would not matter, and then shows how several ways in which the actual world of...