Reconciling Bagehot and the Fed's Response to September 11

Antoine Martin ()

Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, 2009, vol. 41, issue 2-3, pages 397-415

Abstract: Bagehot (1873) states that to prevent bank panics a central bank should provide liquidity at a "very high rate of interest." In contrast, most of the theoretical literature on liquidity provision suggests that central banks should lend at an interest rate of zero. This is broadly consistent with the Federal Reserve's behavior in the days following September 11, 2001. This paper shows that both policies can be reconciled. With commodity money, as in Bagehot's time, liquidity is scarce and a high price allows banks to self-select. In contrast, the Fed has a virtually unlimited ability to temporarily expand the money supply so self-selection is unnecessary. Copyright (c) 2009 Federal Reserve Bank of New York with Exclusive License to Print by The Ohio State University.

Date: 2009
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1538-4616.2009.00210.x link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mcb:jmoncb:v:41:y:2009:i:2-3:p:397-415

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Money, Credit and Banking is edited by Pok-Sang Lam, Deborah Lucas, Masao Ogaki and Kenneth D. West

More articles in Journal of Money, Credit and Banking from Blackwell Publishing
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().