Did It Matter What Types of Assets the Fed Purchased?

August 15, 2016

One of the major intents of the Fed’s large-scale asset purchase programs was to drive longer-term interest rates down, thus encouraging people to spend more. But how did these large-scale asset purchases affect the economy as a whole, and did the composition of assets purchased matter?

Amir Kermani, an assistant professor at the University of California-Berkeley, examined this question in his paper “Unconventional Monetary Policy and the Allocation of Credit,” presented at the St. Louis Advances in Research (STLAR) Conference on April 7-8. In the video above, he discussed his work in an interview with St. Louis Fed Vice President and Economist David Andolfatto.

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