Working Papers

The purpose of this paper is to describe recent financial innovation in the United States, outline its principal implications with regard to (1) the structure and behavior of financial markets and (2) the conduct of monetary policy, and speculate on the likely character of further innovation in the near-term future.  In the United States as elsewhere, financial innovation has been a continuous but uneven process, where the rate of innovation has varied substantially from one period to the next depending on a variety of circumstances.