[自然科学]货币经济学.pdf

10Interest Rates and Monetary Policy 10.1 Introduction Most central banks in the major industrialized economies implement policy by intervening in the money market to achieve a target level for a short-term interest rate. 1 In the United States, the Federal Reserve sets a target level for the federal funds rate and then influences the supply of bank reserves to maintain the funds rate at the targeted value. The funds rate serves as the operational target for policy, and because it can be closely controlled, it can for most purposes be treated as the instrument of policy. Nevertheless, the theoretical models examined in chapters 2–4 generally treated monetary policy as if it were implemented through the use of a money-supply operating procedure or by some sort of policy rule oriented toward the control of a monetary aggregate. Treating the nominal money supply as the instru- ment of monetary policy is the approach taken in most undergraduate textbooks in which financial-market equilibrium is summarized by an LM curve.2 This perspec- tive emphasizes the role of money-demand disturbances in a¤ecting the link between the money supply, interest rates, and real economic activity. If the central bank can directly control short-term interest rates, the predict- ability (or unpredictability) of money demand becomes less relevant. Instead, the linkages between the very short-term interest rate the central bank controls and the broad range of market interest rates that a¤ect investment and consumption spend- ing, as well as the link between interest rates and exchange rates, become of critical importance. In this chapter, we examine the implications of using a nominal interest rate as the operational instrument of monetary policy. The actual policy instrument of cen- tral banks is usually the supply of