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The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements, which includes information about the targeted Federal fund rate and revision to the future path of monetary policy on Southeast Asian stock market performance.

This paper has used a sample of five national equity market indexes over the period 1997-2013 that covers 132 scheduled FOMC meetings. The authors have developed the model of Wongswan (2009) and Kontonikas et al. (2013) to quantify target surprise and path surprise.

The results first show that all the stock markets examined do respond to information in FOMC announcements. Second, the target Federal fund rate has more impact on Southeast Asian stocks performance than information about the future path of monetary policy does. Third, different Southeast Asian equity markets respond similarly to targeting the Federal fund rate, while the responses to monetary policy differ from each other. Fourth, the response of each country to the FOMC announcement is not statistically different in the two periods of financial crisis.

Southeast Asian financial markets are increasingly highly correlated to the US market. The main channel in which FOMC announcement has impact on Southeast Asian stock markets is through US price transmission. This is the case of foreign firms borrowing from the US market. Then, an increase in interest rate, which means that the cost of financing increases, will lower firm equity value.

The understanding of the response of the Southeast Asian stock markets to target surprise and path surprise, and the impact of each surprise in different time periods, would be important to investors and encourage further discussion amongst academics in Southeast Asia, where stock markets have been emerging in recent years.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the content of the statements that are released by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) after its meetings, identify the main textual associative patterns in the statements and examine their impact on the US treasury market.

Latent semantic analysis (LSA), a language processing technique that allows recognition of the textual associative patterns in documents, is applied to all the statements released by the FOMC between 2003 and 2014, so as to identify the main textual “themes” used by the Committee in its communication to the public. The importance of the main identified “themes” is tracked over time, before examining their (collective and individual) effect on treasury market yield volatility via time-series regression analysis.

We find that FOMC statements incorporate multiple, multifaceted and recurring textual themes, with six of them being able to characterize most of the communicated monetary policy in the authors’ sample period. The themes are statistically significant in explaining the variation in three-month, two-year, five-year and ten-year treasury yields, even after controlling for monetary policy uncertainty and the concurrent economic outlook.

The main research implication of the authors’ study is that the LSA can successfully identify the most economically significant themes underlying the Fed’s communication, as the latter is expressed in monetary policy statements. The authors feel that the findings of the study would be strengthened if the analysis was repeated using intra-day (tick-by-tick or five-minute) data on treasury yields.

The authors’ findings are consistent with the notion that the move to “increased transparency” by the Fed is important and meaningful for financial and capital markets, as suggested by the significant effect that the most important identified textual themes have on treasury yield volatility.

This paper makes a timely contribution to a fairly recent stream of research that combines specific textual and statistical techniques so as to conduct content analysis. To the best of their knowledge, the authors’ study is the first that applies the LSA to the statements released by the FOMC.

This paper examines the thesis that the Federal Reserve adopted a tighter monetary policy in 1994 than economic conditions warranted. The empirical evidence suggests the FOMC did react differently to the basic economic indicators than under economic normalcy, but not differently than it would have under similar, prior tight money economic conditions. E52

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings and the changes of the target rates on stock market uncertainty.

Multivariate regression analysis is applied to the historical data of VIX, FOMC meetings and target rates. Subtle relations are revealed by further categorizing the FOMC meetings into being scheduled and unscheduled and distinguishing the signs of the changes in VIX and target rates. CPI and the prime rate are used for robustness test.

The authors first examine the relation between FOMC meetings and target surprises; the results indicate that unscheduled FOMC meetings heavily impact the target surprises. Then, the authors investigate the relation between FOMC meetings and VIX changes; the results show that both unscheduled and scheduled FOMC meetings impact VIX, where the impacts of scheduled FOMC meetings are more substantial. The authors also analyze the responses of VIX to the target surprises, and the results reveal that there is an asymmetric effect of target surprises on VIX, where the influences of the scheduled positive target surprises are more significant. Finally, by examining the relation between the FOMC meeting and the risk-neutral density of the VIX option, the authors conclude that both KURT and SKEW are more affected by unscheduled FOMC meetings.

Deeper dimensions of the relations between VIX, FOMC meetings and target rates are analyzed and more insightful understandings of such relations are gained.

After the COVID-19 outbreak, the Federal Reserve has undertaken several monetary policies to alleviate the pandemic consequences on the markets. This paper aims to evaluate the effects of the Federal Reserve monetary policy on the cryptocurrency dynamics during the COVID19 pandemic.

We examine the response and feedback effects via an event study methodology. For this purpose, abnormal returns (AR) and cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) around the first FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) announcement related to the COVID-19 pandemic for the top five cryptocurrencies are explored. We, further investigate the effect of the eight FOMC statement announcements during the COVID19 pandemic on these cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether, Litecoin, and Ripple). In the above-mentioned crypto-currency markets, we investigate the presence of bubbles by using the PSY test. We then examine the concordance of the dates of these bubbles with the dates of the FOMC announcements.

The empirical results show that the first FOMC event has a negative significant effect after 4 days of the announcement date for all studied cryptocurrencies except Tether. The results also indicate that cumulative abnormal returns are significant during the event windows of (−3,8), (−3,9), and (−3,10). Besides, we find that Bitcoin, Ethereum and, Litecoin lived short bubbles lasting for a few days. However, Ripple and Tether markets present no bubbles and no explosive periods.

This paper presents trained proof that FOMC announcements have a positive effect on volatility's predictive capacity. This work therefore promotes the study of the data quality of volatility in future research as well.

The justified effect of the FOMC announcements on cryptocurrency as a speculative asset has practical implications for investors in building their trading strategies in anticipation of the next FOMC announcement. Therefore, this study implies that the FOMC announcements contain very relevant information for investors in the cryptocurrency market. This research may not only encourage a better understanding of the evolution of the expectations of policymakers, but also facilitate a better understanding of how these expectations are developed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disturbed the stability of financial markets, inciting the Fed to take some monetary regulations. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first one that analyses the response of five major cryptocurrencies to FOMC announcements during COVID 19 pandemic and associates these dates with bubble occurrences.

After the COVID-19 outbreak, the Federal Reserve has undertaken several monetary policies to alleviate the pandemic consequences on the stock markets leading to a misunderstanding on the cryptocurrency market response. This paper aims to evaluate the effects of the Federal Reserve monetary policy on the Islamic and conventional cryptocurrency dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic. We, specifically, examine the associate bubbles and feedbacks effects.

This paper developed a novel methodology that detects market bubbles using the statistical indicators defined by Psychological (PSY) tests. It also investigated the effect of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements on conventional and Islamic cryptocurrencies compatible with Islamic laws “Shari’ah” by using the event-driven regression.

The empirical results show that the FOMC announcements have a positive significant effect after one day of the event and a negative effect before two days of the announcement on the conventional cryptocurrency markets. However, the reaction of Islamic cryptocurrencies to these events is not significant except for Hello Gold after one day of the announcement. Besides, the Hello Gold and X8X cryptocurrencies present no bubbles during this period. However, Bitcoin and Ethereum markets have short-lived bubbles.

The main contribution of this study is the investigation of the response and vulnerability to pandemic shocks of a new category of cryptocurrencies backed by tangible assets. This work has practical implications as it provides new insights into trading opportunities and market reactions.

To our knowledge, this work is the first study that compares the response of Islamic and conventional cryptocurrency markets to FOMC announcements during the COVID-19 pandemic and examines the presence of bubbles in these markets. Besides, the originality of this work is derived from the novelty of the data employed and the method used (PSY tests) in this study.

Social scientists have increasingly turned to constructivist models to explain when, and how, international and world-level social forces constrain the policy-making autonomy of national states. While constructivists have shown that international ideational processes matter for domestic policy making, they have had a harder time explaining why some ideas gain prominence in policy discussions while others do not. This chapter develops an institutionally centered materialist model of idea selection, arguing that international relations of dependency give actors who control vital financial resources a greater capacity to shape the ideational agenda. This model is explored through a case study of the international sources of American monetary policy in the early 1960s. A detailed examination of archival materials shows that European officials at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development were able to advance their own ideas for American monetary policy because the United States was dependent on European cooperation to help resolve its mounting balance of payments problems.