Session 9: Monetary Policy in the New Environment
The Federal Reserve has undertaken the largest change in monetary policy since at least 1979, bringing the federal funds rate down to near-zero,directly intervening in major credit markets, and dramatically increasing the size of its balance sheet. What do these changes mean to the economic and financial outlook, and to the future of monetary policy?
Presentations
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Speakers
Katharine Warne
Edward Jones, moderator
Kate Warne, Ph.D., CFA, has been with the Edward Jones Research department since 1997. She was named a principal with the firm in 1999 and became a member of the Investment Policy Advisory Committee in 2003.
Warne is the firm’s market strategist in Canada and the U.K., interpreting market conditions and recommending appropriate long-term investment strategies to aid the firm’s more than 7 million clients in reaching their investment goals.
Warne holds a doctorate in economics, specializing in finance and competitive strategy, from Yale University, a master of science from the London School of Economics and a bachelor’s degree with high honors from Swarthmore College. She earned her Chartered Financial Analyst designation in 1997.
Warne has appeared on CBS, CNBC, CNN, BBC, Canada’s CBC and Business News Network. She has been quoted in such major publications as The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, the Scotsman, the Financial Times, Forbes and Fortune.
Warne was the energy analyst at Edward Jones prior to assuming her current position as market strategist. She has worked for AT&T and General Motors, and was an assistant professor of finance at the John M. Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis. Warne previously lectured at Yale University and was an economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisors.
Kenneth Kuttner
Williams College
Ken Kuttner is a professor of economics at Williams College, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Mr. Kuttner has published numerous articles in the fields of macroeconomics, monetary policy, and financial economics. His research has addressed such issues as the roles of monetary aggregates and interest rates in monetary policy, inflation targeting, methods for estimating potential output, the Japanese economy, and financial markets’ reaction to shifts in Federal Reserve policy. An internationally recognized authority on monetary policy issues, Mr. Kuttner is a frequent speaker in academic and policy forums, and he has been a visiting scholar at the central banks of Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Japan, and Portugal. He is also affiliated with the Center on Japanese Economy and Business at Columbia Business School, and with the Centre for Finance and Credit Markets at the University of Nottingham.
Notable publications by Mr. Kuttner’s include: “What Explains the Stock Market’s Reaction to Federal Reserve Policy (with Ben Bernanke), Journal of Finance (2005); “The Great Recession: Lessons for Macroeconomic Policy from Japan” (with Adam Posen), Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (2001); “Monetary Policy Surprises and Interest Rates: Evidence from the Fed funds Futures Market,” Journal of Monetary Economics (2001); and “Are There Bank Effects in Borrowers’ Cost of Funds? Evidence from a Matched Sample of Borrowers and Banks” (with Glenn Hubbard and Darius Palia), Journal of Business (2002). His work has also appeared in the American Economic Review, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Regional Science, Journal of Futures Markets, Journal of Econometrics, North American Journal of Economics and Finance, and International Journal of Finance and Economics. Mr. Kuttner currently serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking.
Prior to joining the Williams faculty, Mr. Kuttner was the Danforth-Lewis Professor of Economics at Oberlin College. He has held nonacademic positions as Assistant Vice President in the research departments of the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Chicago, where he specialized in the analysis of monetary policy issues. Mr. Kuttner’s other academic experience includes positions as a visiting professor at Columbia Business School, the New Economic School in Moscow, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He has also served as an adjunct professor at New York University, Columbia Business School, the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago, and DePaul University. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1989, and an A.B. degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1982.
William Poole
CATO Institute
William Poole is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Senior Advisor to Merk Investments and, as of fall 2008, Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the University of Delaware.
Prior to joining Cato, Poole was the president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. He directed the activities of the bank's head office in St. Louis, as well as its three branches in Little Rock, Ark., Louisville, Ky., and Memphis, Tenn. In addition, he represented the Bank on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the Federal Reserve's chief monetary policymaking body.
Before that, Poole was Herbert H. Goldberger Professor of Economics at Brown University. He served on the Brown faculty from 1974 to 1998 and the faculty of The Johns Hopkins University from 1963 to 1969. Between these two university positions, he was senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington. He was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers in the first Reagan administration, from 1982 to 1985.
Poole has engaged in a wide range of professional activities, including publishing numerous papers in professional journals. He has published two books, Money and the Economy: A Monetarist View, in 1978, and Principles of Economics, in 1991. During his 10 years at the St. Louis Fed, he gave over 150 speeches on a variety of topics. In 1980-81, he was a visiting economist at the Reserve Bank of Australia and in 1991, Bank Mees and Hope Visiting Professor of Economics at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. At various times, he served on advisory boards of the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and New York, and the Congressional Budget Office.
Poole attended Swarthmore College, receiving an AB degree in 1959. He received MBA and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago in 1963 and 1966, respectively. Swarthmore honored him with a Doctor of Laws degree in 1989.