The Fed’s Purchase of Agency MBS is Likely to Continue, Current and Former Officials Suggest
May 26, 2017
A new working paper from University of California at Irvine economics professor Eric Swanson suggests the U.S. central bank’s bond buying activities will continue, to one extent or another, perhaps indefinitely. The reason? What the Federal Reserve did in the wake of the financial crisis produced longer-lasting results than what it said. Swanson, a former researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said both the Fed’s Open Market Committee guidance on the likely future path of the federal funds rate and its large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) have had positive effects. The goal of both policies was...