The Fed's actions during the development and burst of the US real estate bubble highlight a Central Bank's dilemma when facing a financial process of great magnitude. During the bubble's development and growth, the Fed was lenient since it considered that the increase in real estate prices helped reduce the risk of financial instability brought on by the financial crisis from 2000 to 2002. When the subprime crisis surfaced, the Fed started to act vigorously as a lender of last resort, with a vigorous expansion of the monetary basis in order to defend the system from the risk of a widespread default in the interbank market. In both cases the Fed was pragmatic and discretionary, and did not follow the mainstream thesis in economics analysis, the so called "New Monetary Consensus". However, at the same time, the US Central Bank is a "prisoner" of these thesis and of the financial interests that help it sustain them: the thesis that the financial market's deregulation benefits the entire society inhibited interventionist actions that would have restrained the new financial instruments in the housing market and the thesis that the main goal of the Monetary Authority should be price stability contributed to the leniency with the increasing risks in the financial markets.
Federal Reserve; Monetary policy; Subprime crisis; Financial deregulation
