Working Paper: NBER ID: w17425
Authors: Michael D. Bordo; Owen F. Humpage; Anna J. Schwartz
Abstract: If official interventions convey private information useful for price discovery in foreign-exchange markets, then they should have value as a forecast of near-term exchange-rate movements. Using a set of standard criteria, we show that approximately 60 percent of all U.S. foreign-exchange interventions between 1973 and 1995 were successful in this sense. This percentage, however, is no better than random. U.S. intervention sales and purchases of foreign exchange were incapable of forecasting dollar appreciations or depreciations. U.S. interventions, however, were associated with more moderate dollar movements in a manner consistent with leaning against the wind, but only about 22 percent of all U.S. interventions conformed to this pattern. We also found that the larger the size of an intervention, the greater was its probability of success, although some interventions were inefficiently large. Other potential characteristics of intervention, notably coordination and secrecy, did not seem to influence our success rates.
Keywords: foreign exchange interventions; exchange rate movements; US monetary policy
JEL Codes: E52; E58; F31; N22
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| US foreign exchange interventions (F31) | exchange rate changes (F31) |
| larger US foreign exchange interventions (F31) | probability of success (C25) |
| characteristics (coordination and secrecy) (D70) | success rates of interventions (I24) |