In general, I think the facilities have worked quite well. In those areas where the facilities have been active, we generally have seen an improvement in market conditions.

But the facilities have not been a panacea for three reasons. First, the facilities cannot address the fundamental problem—the shortage of capital in the banking system...

See Don Kohn's comment on the same day about the Fed's inability to take risk.

 In December, the Committee took the historic final step of lowering the federal funds rate essentially to its "zero bound," establishing a target range of 0 to ¼ percent and communicating its expectation that weak economic conditions would likely warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for some time. This move exhausts the Fed's ability to provide stimulus through "conventional" monetary policy actions. But it by no means exhausts the Fed's options to stimulate the economy through other measures. The Committee's focus going forward will be on "non-conventional" programs that use its balance sheet to improve the functioning of financial markets, an arena where considerable scope for action remains.

The Fed's current "balance sheet approach" to monetary policy creates an entirely new set of policy issues and challenges... In effect, the Fed must judge where to intervene, deciding where market dysfunction is greatest and where adverse consequences for the overall economy are particularly severe. Furthermore, many of the interventions are novel, so no straightforward methods are available to quantify their effectiveness. There are also no clear guidelines for the Fed to gauge the appropriate size of its interventions and few precedents for the Fed to use in communicating its policy stance to the public beyond announcing new programs and describing their terms in detail. Although the purpose of most programs is to lower borrowing costs, the Fed must be careful to avoid the risks that could result from targeting some predetermined yield or spread. Finally, the Fed must ensure that it has an exit strategy to wind down the facilities in a timely and effective way when they are no longer needed.

The Federal Reserve has undertaken policy actions of historic proportion. We have aggressively cut the federal funds rate, our traditional policy lever. We have also created multiple new lending facilities and transformed the asset side of our balance sheet. And, going forward, we will be expanding nontraditional policies now that the fed funds rate is approximately zero. Accordingly, we are faced with the challenge of calibrating these unfamiliar policies and, in the future, determining the appropriate time and methods for winding them down.

Evans said that based on the outlook for rising unemployment, falling industrial production and a wider output gap, economic models suggest rates should be below zero.

"If it were not constrained by zero, those models would want to push it below zero, but that's not possible," Evans told reporters after a panel at the American Economic Association's meeting in San Francisco.

Quantitative easing, a way to flood the banking system with large amounts of money, "is a way to mimic below-zero rates and provide support to the economy," he said.

As reprted by Reuters.

You can see the size and breadth of the Fed’s efforts to counter the collapse of the credit mechanism in our balance sheet. At the beginning of this year, the assets on the books of the Fed totaled $960 billion. Today, our assets exceed $1.9 trillion. I would not be surprised to see them aggregate to $3 trillion—roughly 20 percent of GDP—by the time we ring in the New Year. The composition of our holdings has shifted considerably. Previously, almost 100 percent of our holdings were in the form of core holdings of U.S. Treasuries; today, less than a third are. The remainder consists of claims deriving from our new facilities.

Although the U.S. economy has largely escaped any deflation since World War II, there are some well-founded reasons to presume that deflation is more of a threat to economic growth than is inflation. For one, the lower bound on nominal interest rates at zero threatens ever-rising real rates if deflation intensifies. A related consequence is that even if debtors are able to refinance loans at zero nominal interest rates, they may still face high and rising real rates that cause their balance sheets to deteriorate.

Another concern about deflation resides in labor markets. Some studies have suggested that nominal wages do not easily adjust downward. If lower price inflation is accompanied by lower average wage inflation, then the prevalence of nominal wages being constrained from falling could increase as price inflation moves toward or below zero. In these circumstances, the effective clearing of labor markets would be inhibited, with the consequence being higher rates of unemployment.

Taken together, these considerations suggest that deflation could well be more damaging than inflation to economic growth. While this asymmetry should not be overlooked, several factors limit its significance. In particular, more rapid advances in productivity can make this asymmetry less severe. Fast growth of productivity, by buoying expectations of future advances of wages and earnings and thus aggregate demand, enables real interest rates to be higher than would otherwise be the case without restricting economic growth. Moreover, to the extent that more-rapid growth of productivity shows through to faster gains in nominal wages, there will be fewer instances in which nominal wages will be pressured to fall.

One also should not overstate the difficulties posed for monetary policy by the zero bound on interest rates and nominal wage inflexibility even in the absence of faster productivity growth. The expansion of the monetary base can proceed even if overnight rates are driven to their zero lower bound. The Federal Reserve has authority to purchase Treasury securities of any maturity and indeed already purchases such securities as part of its procedures to keep the overnight rate at its desired level. This authority could be used to lower interest rates at longer maturities. Such actions have precedent: Between 1942 and 1951, the Federal Reserve put a ceiling on longer-term Treasury yields at 2-1/2 percent. With respect to potential difficulties in labor markets, results from research remain ambiguous on the extent and persistence of downward rigidity in nominal compensation.

Clearly, it would be desirable to avoid deflation. But if deflation were to develop, options for an aggressive monetary policy response are available.

To stimulate aggregate spending when short-term interest rates have reached zero, the Fed must expand the scale of its asset purchases or, possibly, expand the menu of assets that it buys. Alternatively, the Fed could find other ways of injecting money into the system--for example, by making low-interest-rate loans to banks or cooperating with the fiscal authorities.

So what then might the Fed do if its target interest rate, the overnight federal funds rate, fell to zero? One relatively straightforward extension of current procedures would be to try to stimulate spending by lowering rates further out along the Treasury term structure...One approach...would be for the Fed to commit to holding the overnight rate at zero for some specified period...A more direct method, which I personally prefer, would be for the Fed to begin announcing explicit ceilings for yields on longer-maturity Treasury debt (say, bonds maturing within the next two years)...Of course, if operating in relatively short-dated Treasury debt proved insufficient, the Fed could also attempt to cap yields of Treasury securities at still longer maturities, say three to six years. Yet another option would be for the Fed to use its existing authority to operate in the markets for agency debt. (for example, mortgage-backed securities issued by Ginnie Mae, the Government National Mortgage Association).

Historical experience tends to support the proposition that a sufficiently determined Fed can peg or cap Treasury bond prices and yields at other than the shortest maturities. The most striking episode of bond-price pegging occurred during the years before the Federal Reserve-Treasury Accord of 1951.¹⁰ Prior to that agreement, which freed the Fed from its responsibility to fix yields on government debt, the Fed maintained a ceiling of 2-1/2 percent on long-term Treasury bonds for nearly a decade. Moreover, it simultaneously established a ceiling on the twelve-month Treasury certificate of between 7/8 percent to 1-1/4 percent and, during the first half of that period, a rate of 3/8 percent on the 90-day Treasury bill. The Fed was able to achieve these low interest rates despite a level of outstanding government debt (relative to GDP) significantly greater than we have today, as well as inflation rates substantially more variable. At times, in order to enforce these low rates, the Fed had actually to purchase the bulk of outstanding 90-day bills. Interestingly, though, the Fed enforced the 2-1/2 percent ceiling on long-term bond yields for nearly a decade without ever holding a substantial share of long-maturity bonds outstanding.¹¹ For example, the Fed held 7.0 percent of outstanding Treasury securities in 1945 and 9.2 percent in 1951 (the year of the Accord), almost entirely in the form of 90-day bills. For comparison, in 2001 the Fed held 9.7 percent of the stock of outstanding Treasury debt.

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11. See Eichengreen and Garber (1991) and Toma (1992) for descriptions and analyses of the pre-Accord period. Both articles conclude that the Fed's commitment to low inflation helped convince investors to hold long-term bonds at low rates in the 1940s and 1950s. (A similar dynamic would work in the Fed's favor today.) The rate-pegging policy finally collapsed because the money creation associated with buying Treasury securities was generating inflationary pressures. Of course, in a deflationary situation, generating inflationary pressure is precisely what the policy is trying to accomplish.

An episode apparently less favorable to the view that the Fed can manipulate Treasury yields was the so-called Operation Twist of the 1960s, during which an attempt was made to raise short-term yields and lower long-term yields simultaneously by selling at the short end and buying at the long end. Academic opinion on the effectiveness of Operation Twist is divided. In any case, this episode was rather small in scale, did not involve explicit announcement of target rates, and occurred when interest rates were not close to zero.

A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman's famous "helicopter drop" of money.  [18]

[18] A tax cut financed by money creation is the equivalent of a bond-financed tax cut plus an open-market operation in bonds by the Fed, and so arguably no explicit coordination is needed. However, a pledge by the Fed to keep the Treasury's borrowing costs low, as would be the case under my preferred alternative of fixing portions of the Treasury yield curve, might increase the willingness of the fiscal authorities to cut taxes.

Unorthodox monetary policy may work, but it obviously would have to be through channels other than reducing short-term interest rates since they are already at zero. Those channels might include reducing expected short-term rates by tilting down long-term rates, or reducing term or risk premiums in long-term rates. The latter also would tend to reduce long-term rates and exchange rates as well.

Pumping up the monetary base by itself would be unlikely to be effective in doing either of these things, that is, reducing short-term rate expectations or term and risk premiums. Such increases in the base would tend to go into excess reserves and there is no obvious reason why that would change expectations about future rates. Tilting open market operations to a limited degree toward bonds or foreign exchange also is not likely to do much. Studies show that modest changes in the supply of bonds, Operation Twist kinds of things, do not have much effect on bond yields. Sterilized intervention, which is what in effect such foreign exchange buying would be, also does not do much. However, massive purchases of bonds or massive intervention might. The Federal Reserve did set the rate on government bonds during World War II. If a central bank were willing to purchase all the supply of government bonds, it could set the bond rate again, and presumably this would feed through to corporate borrowing rates as well. So, there are extreme policies involving massive purchases that should work in lowering term premiums and risk premiums.

Presented as part of the staff briefing at the June 30-July 1 FOMC meeting in 1998.

Now, what is interesting here is that there has been extensive literature on Operation Twist, and my recollection is that it's pretty mixed. No one has been able to confirm that there is a significant supply-side effect occurring in that particular context. On the other hand, there is also evidence, mainly in the recent period, that the Treasury rate is higher relative to private instruments than it otherwise would be, from which one assumes that there is a supply-side effect. So, I would say that there is no really strong analytical evidence that confirms this one way or the other. And what I find a little surprising is how strongly the market responded to Brady's initial [remarks on reducing Treasury long-bond issuance]; I think rates moved down 5 basis points at the long end of the market.