Over the past twenty years, the federal funds rate has evolved from being an intermediate target or indicator variable in discussions of monetary policy to the Federal Reserve’s (exogenous) policy instrument. How the funds rate is characterized has important implications for modeling,...

The Federal Reserve has responsibilities in three functional areas: Bank supervision and regulation, monetary policy, and services to the payments system. Although much has changed in each of these areas since the Fed was founded nearly one hundred years ago, the Federal Reserve System has...