Suchergebnisse

This book provides pathbreaking statistical evidence on when the Administration tried to influence monetary policy and when the Federal Reserve did and did not respond. This revised edition provides the first statistical evidence on why the Federal Reserve behaved the way it did. Included in the book is the SAFER data series (Signalling from the Administration to the Federal Reserve) for the entire 1992--1994 period. Expanded data sets on the effect of Congressional and private pressures on monetary policy will be of interest to market participants and scholars who would use these sources to predict movements in short-term interest rates. This new edition includes recent evidence on the causes and effects of Presidential appointments to the Federal Reserve helping to predict the monetary policy voting behavior of prospective Federal Reserve Board appointees. The book closes by developing an innovative plan to restructure the Federal Reserve that would be mutually acceptable to politicians and central bankers, while simultaneously improving inflation performance

This paper reports on a program that begun in 1985 to research political and private pressures on monetary policy. The program developed a number of measures of outside pressures on monetary policy, identified the time periods and circumstances under which the Federal Reserve was responsive to these measures, and indicated how different classes of Fed officials responded to certain of these pressures. Initial findings appear in a number of journal articles from 1987 to 1992. Havrilesky (1993) extends and refines these findings by employing new and larger data sets. Subsequent articles amplify the findings by estimating monetary policy reaction functions that specifically introduce outside influences together with state‐of‐the‐economy measures as explanatory variables.

This paper develops some implications of assigning the Federal Reserve the contradictory goals of keeping interest and unemployment rates from rising while at the same time expecting the Fed to control inflation. The resulting imbalance causes Fed officials to engage in the classical psychological defenses of denial, projection, and obfuscation. Prolonged defense of an unbalanced state may lead to protective postures with dysfunctional implications. Federal Reserve secrecy, self‐censorship, illusions of unanimity, and perceptions of need for insulation from external threat all are protective postures that may cause the Fed to lose credibility and alienate its professional staff. This, in turn, may promote the cause of monetary reform. This paper distinguishes between radical and piecemeal monetary reform and indicates why the latter could succeed in garnering political support.

This paper develops a public choice theory of monetary policy and compares it with political‐macroeconomic outcomes theory. The paper develops support for the public choice theory from recent historical evidence. It then employs this theory to explain the difficulty of effecting monetary reform and, in the absence of reform, the difficulty of implementing sustained periods of monetary restraint.