Large-scale asset purchases by the Federal Reserve: did they work?

Joseph Gagnon, Matthew Raskin, Julie Remache and Brian P. Sack

No 441, Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: Since December 2008, the Federal Reserve's traditional policy instrument, the target federal funds rate, has been effectively at its lower bound of zero. In order to further ease the stance of monetary policy as the economic outlook deteriorated, the Federal Reserve purchased substantial quantities of assets with medium and long maturities. In this paper, we explain how these purchases were implemented and discuss the mechanisms through which they can affect the economy. We present evidence that the purchases led to economically meaningful and long-lasting reductions in longer-term interest rates on a range of securities, including securities that were not included in the purchase programs. These reductions in interest rates primarily reflect lower risk premiums, including term premiums, rather than lower expectations of future short-term interest rates.

Keywords: Securities; Federal funds rate; Federal Reserve System; Monetary policy; Rate of return; Interest rates (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba and nep-mon
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (99)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr441.pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr441.html (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Large-scale asset purchases by the Federal Reserve: did they work? (2011)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fednsr:441

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().