The Federal Reserve implements its monetary policy by using open market operations in U.S. government securities to target the federal funds rate. A substantial decline in the stock of U.S. Treasury debt could interfere with the conduct of monetary policy, possibly forcing the Fed to rely more heavily on discount window lending or to conduct open market transactions in other types of securities. Either would cause the implementation of monetary policy to resemble the methods used by the Fed before World War II. This paper describes two things: (i) how the Fed implemented monetary policy before the war and (ii) the conflicts that arose within the Fed over the allocation of private-sector credit when discount window loans and Fed purchases of private securities were a substantial component of Federal Reserve credit. Those conflicts help explain the Fed’s failure to respond vigorously to the Great Depression. The experience suggests that a renewed reliance on the discount window or on open market operations in securities other than those issued by the U.S. Treasury could hamper the conduct of monetary policy if it leads to increased pressure on the Fed to affect the allocation of credit.
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Article provided by Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in its journal Review.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Gerald P. Dwyer, Jr. & R. Alton Gilbert, 1989.
"Bank runs and private remedies,"
Review,
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue May, pages 43-61.
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