Official margin requirements in the U.S. stock market were established in October 1934 to limit the amount of credit available for the purpose of buying stocks. Since then, higher or rising margin requirements are associated with lower stock price volatility, lower excess volatility, and smaller deviations of stock prices from their fundamental values. The results hold throughout the post-1934 period and are not very sensitive to the exclusion of the turbulent depression years from the sample. Thus margin requirements seem to be an effective policy tool in curbing destabilizing speculation.

I use weekly Treasury-bill rates with maturities of one to twenty-six weeks to examine the information in forward rates during the 1970s and 1980s. Forward rates contain better information about future changes in spot rates than the information captured by autoregressivea nd vector-autoregressivem odels. Forward rates also have considerable predictive power, which increased after October 1979 and remained strong after October 1982. The results show no necessary connection between interest rate predictability and the degree to which the Fed adheres to interest rate targeting.

I use weekly Treasury‐bill rates with maturities of one to twenty‐six weeks to examine the information in forward rates during the 1970s and 1980s. Forward rates contain better information about future changes in spot rates than the information captured by autoregressivea nd vector‐autoregressivem odels. Forward rates also have considerable predictive power, which increased after October 1979 and remained strong after October 1982. The results show no necessary connection between interest rate predictability and the degree to which the Fed adheres to interest rate targeting.

The author provides evidence on the perceived existence of strong liquidity effect. The analysis is based on the response of the term structure of interest rates to the weekly Federal Reserve announcements of bank reserves during the post‐October 1979 period. It is shown that unanticipated changes in the mix between borrowed and nonborrowed reserves cause expected real interest rates to change after the announcement because they provide information about a future change in the supply of money. A precise model is developed and tested during subperiods of nonborrowed and borrowed reserves targeting by the Fed.

The author provides evidence on the perceived existence of strong liquidity effect. The analysis is based on the response of the term structure of interest rates to the weekly Federal Reserve announcements of bank reserves during the post-October 1979 period. It is shown that unanticipated changes in the mix between borrowed and nonborrowed reserves cause expected real interest rates to change after the announcement because they provide information about a future change in the supply of money. A precise model is developed and tested during subperiods of nonborrowed and borrowed reserves targeting by the Fed.

Higher initial margin requirements are associated with lower subsequent stock market volatility during normal and bull periods, but show no relationship during bear periods. Higher margins are also negatively related to the conditional mean of stock returns, apparently because they reduce systemic risk. We conclude that a prudential rule for setting margins (or other regulatory restrictions) is to lower them in sharply declining markets in order to enhance liquidity and avoid a depyramiding effect in stock prices, but subsequently raise them and keep them at the higher level in order to prevent a future pyramiding effect.

A positive slope of the yield curve is associated with a future increase in real economic activity: consumption (nondurables plus services), consumer durables, and investment. It has extra predictive power over the index of leading indicators, real short-term interest rates, lagged growth in economic activity, and lagged rates of inflation. It outperforms survey forecasts, both in-sample and out-of-sample. Historically, the information in the slope reflected, inter alia, factors that were independent of monetary policy, and thus the slope could have provided useful information both to private investors and to policy makers. THE FLATTENING OF THE yield curve in 1988 and its inversion in early 1989 have been interpreted by many business economists and financial analysts as evidence that a recession is imminent. Implicit in this interpretation is the presumption that a flattening of the yield curve predicts a drop in future spot interest rates and that these lower rates are associated with a lower level of real GNP. Recent empirical work on the term structure of interest rates confirms that changes in the slope of the yield curve predict the correct direction of future changes in spot rates, yet there is little empirical work on the predictability of changes in real economic activity.1 Indeed, given the near-random-walk empirical behavior of real GNP, a finding that the yield curve can predict future changes in real output would be very impressive.2 Predictability of changes in real output is associated with other equally important questions: How much extra information is there in the term

A positive slope of the yield curve is associated with a future increase in real economic activity: consumption (nondurables plus services), consumer durables, and investment. It has extra predictive power over the index of leading indicators, real short‐term interest rates, lagged growth in economic activity, and lagged rates of inflation. It outperforms survey forecasts, both in‐sample and out‐of‐sample. Historically, the information in the slope reflected, inter alia , factors that were independent of monetary policy, and thus the slope could have provided useful information both to private investors and to policy makers.

A positive slope of the yield curve is associated with a future increase in real economic activity: consumption (nondurables plus services), consumer durables, and investment. It has extra predictive power over the index of leading indicators, real short-term interest rates, lagged growth in economic activity, and lagged rates of inflation. It outperforms survey forecasts, both in-sample and out-of-sample. Historically, the information in the slope reflected, inter alia, factors that were independent of monetary policy and, thus, the slope could have provided useful information both to private investors and to policymakers.

A random coefficients Kalman filter model of the response of commodity prices to weekly M1 announcements indicates a gradual evolution in the credibility of the Federal Reserve as an inflation fighter. The October 1979 announcement of a change in monetary policy aimed at reducing inflation did not result in an immediate increase in credibility, and the October 1982 announcement of a policy reversal did not diminish credibility. Credibility does vary with the underlying rate of inflation, which shows that markets pay attention to policy results not simply policy announcements.