Open-Ended Treasury Purchases: From Market Functioning to Financial Easing

Stefania D'Amico, Max Gillet, Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Tim Seida
Additional contact information
Max Gillet: https://www.chicagofed.org/people/g/gillet-max
Sam Schulhofer-Wohl: https://www.dallasfed.org/fed/leadership/schulhofer-wohl
Tim Seida: https://www.chicagofed.org/people/s/seida-tim

No WP 2024-08, Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Abstract: We exploit the Fed’s Treasury purchases conducted from March 2020 to March 2022 to assess whether asset purchases can be tailored to accomplish different objectives: restoring market functioning and providing stimulus. We find that, on average, flow effects are significant in the market-functioning (MF) period (March-September 2020), while stock effects are strong in the QE period (September 2020-March 2022). In the MF period, the elevated frequency and size of the purchase operations allowed flow effects to greatly improve relative price deviations, especially at the long-end of the yield curve. But stock effects remained localized, thus not large enough to be stimulative. In contrast, in the QE period, stock effects were stimulative because cross-asset price impacts got larger as the Fed communication and implementation moved toward “traditional” QE, increasing purchases’ predictability. Lower uncertainty about the expected size and duration of total purchases facilitated their impounding into prices. Overall, these findings suggest that communication and implementation can be used to tailor the goals of asset purchases.

Keywords: Monetary policy tools; Qualitative Easing; Asset purchases (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E43 E44 E52 E58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 63
Date: 2024-03-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cba and nep-mon
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DOI: 10.21033/wp-2024-08

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