Monetary Policy and Real Interest Rates: New Evidence from the Money Stock Announcements

This paper presents new evidence on how asset prices respond to new information about the money stock. It shows that the information content of money stock announcements and the response of asset prices to new information in the announcements vary with changes in the monetary policy regime, the Federal Reserve operating procedures, and the reserve accounting rules. While previous studies have examined how asset prices respond to the money stock announcements under the interest-rate targeting procedure and the nonborrowed reserve procedure, we have included new evidence from the borrowed reserve targeting procedure under both lagged and contemporaneous reserve accounting rules. Looking at how both forward exchange rates and other asset prices respond to the announcements, we distinguish between periods when the asset-price response reflected a change in the real interest rate and those when it reflected a change in the inflation premium. Finally, we show that the new contemporaneous reserve accounting rules have greatly reduced the information content of the money stock announcements.