Suchergebnisse

Introduction : Context and content / Owen F. Humpage -- The uses and misuses of economic history / Barry Eichengreen -- Federal reserve policy today in historical perspective / Marvin Goodfriend -- How and why the Fed must change in its second century / Allan H. Meltzer -- The lender of last resort : lessons from the Fed's first 100 years / Mark A. Carlson and David C. Wheelock -- Close but not a central bank : the New York clearing house and issues of clearing house loan certificates / Jon Moen and Ellis Tallman -- Central Bank independence : can it survive a crisis? / Forrest Capie and Geoffrey Wood -- Politics on the road to the U.S. monetary union / Peter L. Rousseau -- U.S. precedents for Europe / Harold James -- The limits of bimetallism / Christopher M. Meissner -- The reserve pyramid and interbank contagion during the Great Depression / Kris James Mitchener and Gary Richardson -- Would large-scale asset purchases have helped in the 1930s? An investigation of the responsiveness of bond yields from the 1930s to changes in debt levels / John Landon-Lane -- A tale of two countries and two booms, Canada and the United States in the 1920s and 2000s : the roles of monetary and financial stability policies / Ehsan U. Choudhri and Lawrence L. Schembri -- It is history but it's no accident : differences in residential mortgage markets in Canada and the United States / Angela Redish -- Monetary regimes and policy on a global scale : the oeuvre of Michael D. Bordo / Hugh Rockoff and Eugene N. White -- Reflections on the history and future of central banking / Michael D. Bordo.

This Economic Commentary explains how warehousing—a seemingly innocuous institutional arrangement between the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury—came to threaten the Fed's independence. Warehousing began as an arcane procedure designed to help the Treasury cover a specific type of foreign-exchange exposure. It then grew into a supplemental source of funding for the Treasury's foreign-exchange interventions. Eventually the procedure morphed into a sizeable off-budget source of funding for other Treasury activities and seemed an inappropriate subversion of the congressional appropriations process, a development that raised concerns within the Fed about its ability to conduct monetary policy free from political concerns.

The recent global financial crisis left governments in many advanced countries with very heavy debt burdens and their central banks with huge portfolios of government bonds. With many central banks today still facing policy rates that are uncomfortably close to zero, some may follow the example of Japan, which recently added a new long-term interest-rate target to its short-term target to give itself "yield-curve control." The Federal Reserve's foray into similar territory around the Second World War suggests that combining yield-curve control with quantitative easing when government borrowing needs are substantial can create constraints on monetary policy that are not easily removed.

Inflation is often thought to be the result of excessive money creation—too many dollars chasing too few goods. While in principle this is true, in practice there can be a lot of leeway, so long as trust in the monetary authority's ability to keep things under control remains high. The American colonists' experience with paper money illustrates how and why this is so and offers lessons for the modern day.

The Federal Reserve System is a model of an independent central bank, with the authority to resist political pressure and act in the long-term best economic interest of the country. But this has not always been the case. In the past—and not too distant past at that—US monetary policy has frequently yielded to other governmental requirements. Even for the modern Federal Reserve, independence is a nuanced, mutable and, ultimately, fragile concept, but one that is essential to maintain.. This Economic Commentary is a short version of: "Independence within—not of—Government: The Emergence of the Federal Reserve as a Modern Central Bank," Owen F. Humpage, 2014. Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, working paper no. 14-02. That paper contains a complete set of references and figures.

Since the mid-1990s, monetary authorities in most large developed countries have backed away from foreign-exchange intervention—buying and selling foreign currencies to influence exchange rates. Switzerland's recent experience goes a long way to illustrate why: Foreign-exchange intervention did not afford the Swiss National Bank with a means of systematically affecting the franc independent of Swiss monetary policy, and it left the Bank exposed to foreign-exchange losses. To affect exchange rates, central banks must change their monetary policies.

Over the past couple of decades, central banks have been taking steps to increase the transparency of their monetary policies through clearer communications with the public. While there are many differences between the economic challenges Japan has been struggling with in the past decade and those facing U.S. and European central bankers now, we can learn a great deal about combating deflation from Japan's experiences.

Do the rising commodity prices we have seen in recent years reflect basic supply-and-demand developments in various commodity markets, or are they the first signs of inflation? In practice, it's not always easy to tell the difference—for the public or policymakers—but fundamentally different they are. Central banks can do nothing about relative commodity-price pressures, since central banks do not produce commodities. Likewise, commodity-price shocks do not impair the ability of central banks to control inflation in principle, but they can greatly complicate the task.

In the years prior to our recent economic crisis, foreign savings poured into the United States. Did foreign traders who happened to acquire dollars from American trade defi cits merely choose to keep these funds in dollar-denominated assets? Or, did foreigners decide to increase their savings inordinately and place those funds in dollar-denominated assets? The answer is key to the debate about the sources of liquidity that paved the way to our recent economic problems.

Rainforests in the Northern Territory occur as small patches, and the frugivorous birds that depend on them are thought to move among the patches. I attached radio-transmitters to 41 birds of four species captured in several locations near Darwin. I recorded 55 interpatch flights, and estimated flight rates as between once per day and five days for figbirds and pied imperial-pigeons. The flight rates for rose-crowned fruit-doves and yellow orioles were much lower, but no reliable estimate could be made. The median flight distance was 2.5 km but one in five flights were more than 10 km. In addition, one pigeon flew 220 km in preparation for migration from Australia. Birds often undertook exploratory flights, returning to the original patch. Birds of one species captured together usually flew to different locations. When birds left a patch, it was usually to a distant patch, rather than a near neighbour. These movement patterns demonstrate that frugivorous birds use the rainforest network in a complex way. The birds depend on a network of rainforest patches and the pigeons and figbirds probably disperse large quantities of seeds among the patches. The conservation of rainforest ecosystems in northern Australia will depend on the protection of the current configuration of patches rather than a representative set of patches.

Abstract. Wildfires and hazard reduction burns produce
smoke that contains pollutants including particulate matter. Particulate
matter less than 2.5 µm in diameter (PM2.5) is harmful to human health, potentially causing cardiovascular and respiratory issues that can lead to premature deaths. PM2.5 levels depend on environmental conditions, fire behaviour and smoke dispersal patterns. Fire management agencies need to understand and predict PM2.5 levels associated with a particular fire so that pollution warnings can be sent to communities and/or hazard reduction burns can be timed to avoid the worst conditions for PM2.5 pollution. We modelled PM2.5, measured at air quality stations in New South Wales
(Australia) from ∼ 1400 d when individual fires were
burning near air quality stations, as a function of fire and weather
variables. Using Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) satellite hotspots, we identified days when one fire was burning within 150 km of at least 1 of 48 air quality stations. We extracted ERA5 gridded weather data and daily active fire area estimates
from the hotspots for our modelling. We created random forest models for
afternoon, night and morning PM2.5 levels to understand drivers of
and predict PM2.5. Fire area and boundary layer height were important predictors across the
models, with temperature, wind speed and relative humidity also being important.
There was a strong increase in PM2.5 with decreasing distance, with a
sharp increase when the fire was within 20 km. The models improve our
understanding of the drivers of PM2.5 from individual fires and
demonstrate a promising approach to PM2.5 model development. However,
although the models predicted well overall, there were several large
under-predictions of PM2.5 that mean further model development would be required for the models to be deployed operationally.

Using a set of standard success criteria, we show that Riksbank foreign-exchange interventions between 1993 and 2002 lacked forecast value; that is, the observed number of successes was not significantly greater - and usually substantially smaller - than the number one would anticipate given the martingale nature of exchange-rate movements. Under some success criteria, the Riksbank exhibited negative forecast value, implying that the market could have profited by taking a position opposite that of the bank. Moreover, the likelihood of success was independent of such conditioning factors as the amount of a transaction, the time lapses between interventions, or the number of foreign currencies involved. As such, Riksbank intervention could not operate through an expectations or signaling channel.