Central Banks and Market Interest Rates

Abstract:

In a world of endogenous money, the central bank’s role in monetary policy is reduced to the setting of a very short-term official rate of interest, which indicates the price at which it will make liquidity available to the banking system. However; it is changes in market rates that affect behavior; and so the ability of the central bank to influence anything at all depends, first, on the interaction between official and market rates. In this paper; we use a vector autogressive error correction model to explore the response to changes in the central bank rate of three short-term market rates that have beenfeatured previously in this journal in debates about the demand for endogenous money.

Key Words::

• central banks
• interest rates
• monetary policy