IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fednsr/87456.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Managing the Treasury Yield Curve in the 1940s

Author

Listed:
  • Kenneth D. Garbade

Abstract

This paper examines the efforts of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to first control, and later decontrol, the level and shape of the Treasury yield curve in the 1940s. The paper begins with a brief review of monetary policy in 1938 and a description of the period between September 1939 and December 1941, when the idea of maintaining a fixed yield curve first appeared. It then discusses the financing of U.S. participation in World War II and the experience with maintaining a fixed curve. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the FOMC regained control of monetary policy in the second half of the 1940s. The Committee’s efforts offer two lessons in yield curve management: (1) the shape of the curve cannot be fixed independently of the volatility of interest rates and debt management policies, and (2) large-scale open market operations may be required in the course of refixing, from time to time, the shape of the yield curve.

Suggested Citation

  • Kenneth D. Garbade, 2020. "Managing the Treasury Yield Curve in the 1940s," Staff Reports 913, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fednsr:87456
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr913.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr913.html
    File Function: Summary
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Garbade, Kenneth D., 2012. "Birth of a Market: The U.S. Treasury Securities Market from the Great War to the Great Depression," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262016370, December.
    2. repec:ucp:bkecon:9780226519999 is not listed on IDEAS
    3. Toma, Mark, 1992. "Interest Rate Controls: The United States in the 1940s," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 52(3), pages 631-650, September.
    4. Wicker, Elmus R, 1969. "The World War II Policy of Fixing a Pattern of Interest Rates," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 24(3), pages 447-458, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. David O. Lucca & Jonathan H. Wright, 2024. "The Narrow Channel of Quantitative Easing: Evidence from YCC Down Under," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 79(2), pages 1055-1085, April.
    2. Bordo, Michael D. & Haubrich, Joseph G., 2024. "Low interest rates and the predictive content of the yield curve," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 71(C).
    3. David Andolfatto & Fernando Martin, 2023. "Welfare-enhancing inflation and liquidity premia," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 51, pages 1036-1047, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kenneth D. Garbade, 2016. "Repurchase agreements as an instrument of monetary policy at the time of the Accord," Staff Reports 780, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    2. Kenneth D. Garbade, 2016. "The early years of the primary dealer system," Staff Reports 777, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    3. Owen F. Humpage & Sanchita Mukherjee, 2013. "Even keel and the Great Inflation," Working Papers (Old Series) 1315, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
    4. Kenneth D. Garbade, 2020. "Managing the Maturity Structure of Marketable Treasury Debt: 1953-1983," Staff Reports 936, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    5. Ben S. Bernanke & Vincent R. Reinhart & Brian P. Sack, 2004. "Monetary Policy Alternatives at the Zero Bound: An Empirical Assessment," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 35(2), pages 1-100.
    6. Hilt, Eric & Jaremski, Matthew & Rahn, Wendy, 2022. "When Uncle Sam introduced Main Street to Wall Street: Liberty Bonds and the transformation of American finance," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 145(1), pages 194-216.
    7. Kotaro Ishi & Mr. Kenji Fujita & Mr. Mark R. Stone, 2011. "Should Unconventional Balance Sheet Policies Be Added to the Central Bank toolkit? a Review of the Experience so Far," IMF Working Papers 2011/145, International Monetary Fund.
    8. Etienne Farvaque & Antoine Parent & Piotr Stanek, 2018. "Debates and dissident inside the FOMC during WW2," SciencePo Working papers Main hal-03567133, HAL.
    9. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/2cuu3uj58199fphtovctj05ish is not listed on IDEAS
    10. Michael D. Bordo, 1989. "The Contribution of "A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960" to Monetary History," NBER Chapters, in: Money, History, and International Finance: Essays in Honor of Anna J. Schwartz, pages 15-78, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Arvind Krishnamurthy & Annette Vissing-Jorgensen, 2012. "The Aggregate Demand for Treasury Debt," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 120(2), pages 233-267.
    12. Butkiewicz, James, 2015. "Eugene Meyer And The German Influence On The Origin Of Us Federal Financial Rescues," Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Cambridge University Press, vol. 37(1), pages 57-77, March.
    13. Mark A. Carlson & David C. Wheelock, 2014. "Navigating constraints: the evolution of Federal Reserve monetary policy, 1935-59," Working Papers 2014-13, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
    14. Mark Carlson & David C. Wheelock, 2018. "Did the Founding of the Federal Reserve Affect the Vulnerability of the Interbank System to Contagion Risk?," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 50(8), pages 1711-1750, December.
    15. Marvin Goodfriend, 2012. "The Elusive Promise of Independent Central Banking," Monetary and Economic Studies, Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies, Bank of Japan, vol. 30, pages 39-54, November.
    16. Olga A. Rud & Jean Paul Rabanal, 2018. "Evolution of markets: a simulation with centralized, decentralized and posted offer formats," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 28(3), pages 667-689, August.
    17. Kenneth D. Garbade, 2014. "Direct Purchases of U.S. Treasury Securities by Federal Reserve Banks," Liberty Street Economics 20140929, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    18. Michael D. Bordo & Arunima Sinha, 2016. "A Lesson from the Great Depression that the Fed Might Have Learned: A Comparison of the 1932 Open Market Purchases with Quantitative Easing," Economics Working Papers 16113, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
    19. Michael D. Bordo & Arunima Sinha, 2023. "The 1932 Federal Reserve Open‐Market Purchases as a Precedent for Quantitative Easing," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 55(5), pages 1177-1212, August.
    20. Kenneth D. Garbade, 2019. "Federal Reserve Participation in Public Treasury Offerings," Staff Reports 906, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    21. Miguel Cantillo Simon, 2019. "Obtaining implied volatilities from interest rate differentials: New York from 1900 to 1934," Working Papers 201903, Universidad de Costa Rica, revised Nov 2019.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    yield curve management; open market operations; debt management;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G28 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Government Policy and Regulation
    • H63 - Public Economics - - National Budget, Deficit, and Debt - - - Debt; Debt Management; Sovereign Debt
    • N22 - Economic History - - Financial Markets and Institutions - - - U.S.; Canada: 1913-

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fednsr:87456. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Gabriella Bucciarelli (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbnyus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.