Systematic policy For someone my age, it doesn’t seem all that long ago when it was taken for granted that central banking was supposed to be mysterious and secretive – the less said about monetary policy the better. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1994 that the FOMC began to publicly announce the policy changes made at an FOMC meeting.
Up until then, the markets were left to infer the policy action from the Fed’s behavior in the market. 1 But times have most definitely changed. Transparency has replaced secrecy, and open communications have replaced mystery.