This paper provides evidence that the Federal Reserve has an informational advantage over the public that can be exploited to improve activist monetary policy. The informational advantage derives from the Fed?s role as a bank supervisor, and it is shown to be of sufficient duration to be...

Banking crises have continued to emerge in recent years, contributing to severe economic contractions in Japan, Russia, and Southeast Asia. In response, international organizations have advocated enhanced market discipline, encouraging countries to improve disclosure. One reason so little...

Whether central banks should play an active role in bank supervision and regulation is being debated both in the United States and abroad. While the Bank of England has recently been stripped of its supervisory responsibilities and several proposals in the United States have advocated removing...

Recently, several central banks have lost their bank supervisory responsibilities, in part because it has not been shown that supervisory authority improves the conduct of monetary policy. This paper finds that confidential bank supervisory information could help the Board staff more accurately...

Locating the function of bank supervision in the central bank has been a contentious issue, both domestically and internationally. Most discussions of the role of bank supervision in central banking have focused on crisis management and the responsibilities of the central bank as a lender of...

A wave of depository institution failures and dramatic losses to deposit insurance funds occurred in the 1980s and continued into the 1990s. In response, the Congress passed a series of bank regulatory acts intended to address the problems that led to the crisis and prevent its recurrence. The...