money supply announcements and real interest rates abstract current research on the relation between money and asset prices focuses on the reaction of asset prices to money supply announcements in this paper we use the real interest observed in the u k index linked bond market and the nominal interest rate observed in the nominal bond market to study the reaction of real interest rates and expected inflation to money surprises we find that monetary surprises have a strong effect on inflationary expectations we also find some evidence of a positive reaction of long term real interest rates to the m3 announcement

monetary innovations and interest rates this paper examines the effect of unexpected weekly changes in the money supply on financial markets l examination of financial market reaction to weekly monetary surprises provides information on how the economy reacts to monetary changes also the reaction to weekly monetary surprises may put real or imagined constraints on federal reserve behavior as noted by tobin a decade ago certainly the rate of growth of the money stock has become the customary capsule form for describing monetary policy and gauging how easy or tight it is for a time it seemed that public preoccupation with this number might itself be a market constraint on the federal reserve believers in monetarism would regard accelerated growth of m1 as the harbinger of more inflation and higher interest rates if such people were to dominate financial markets they would make it difficult for the fed to carry out a rate reducing expansionary policy tobin 1974 p 70 throughout the paper unexpected weekly changes in the money supply monetary innovations are measured by reported changes in the supply of money minus expected changes where expected changes in money are obtained from market survey data changes in current interest rates of various terms to maturity are used to measure the effects of innovations on financial markets

the money supply announcements puzzle comment in a recent paper in this review 1983 bradford cornell presented a survey of existing literature on the empirical relationship between weekly money supply announcements made by the federal reserve and changes in the spot prices of several financial instruments at the time of the announcement cornell sought to unify and extend the work done in this area by estimating a number of relationships which bear directly on this issue among his main conclusions are that asset markets are efficient with re spect to money supply announcements since only the unexpected component of the announcement is correlated with price changes and that the unexpected compo nent of money supply announcements has a highly significant positive correlation with short term interest rates but only after the october 6 1979 change in fed policy p 651 both of these conclusions are at vari ance with results reported in similar studies by jacob grossman 1981 v vance roley 1982 and thomas urich and paul wachtel 1981 all three find that unanticipated announcements matter in periods before october 6 1979 and roley and urich wachtel find that anticipated announcements matter in at least some of their regressions this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

international market response to announcements of us macroeconomic data abstract this paper presents empirical evidence relating the announcement effects of us money supply and inflation cpi and ppi to eurocurrency interest rates and the foreign currency markets both spot and forward for seven industrial countries over the period 1977 1982 the results indicate that unanticipated components of announced changes in money supply have a significant positive effect on eurocurrency interest rates and a negative effect implying dollar appreciation on the spot exchange rates unanticipated changes in ppi have a positive significant effect on interest rates a small surprisingly negative impact on spot exchange rates and a positive effect on gold prices the cpi has no effect on either market

the effect of unanticipated money on the money and foreign exchange markets abstract a number of studies have attempted to determine why unanticipated increases in the money supply are positively correlated with money market interest rates by examining the response of the foreign exchange market to unanticipated changes in the money stock they have found a significant positive relationship between unanticipated increases in the money supply and the foreign exchange value of the dollar and have interpreted this as evidence for the anticipated liquidity effect hypothesis however these results support this hypothesis only if both markets respond simultaneously to unanticipated changes in money this paper examines the cross market consistency of the response using six bilateral exchange rates and the treasury bill rate all measured over a narrow time interval the results show that in general these markets do not respond simultaneously to money announcements

us money announcements and covered interest parity the case of japan abstract this paper examines the effects of us money announcements on dollar and yen denominated securities in their respective onshore markets the effects are consdered over several periods corresponding to possible us and japanese policy regimes the consistency of the responses is further examined by testing whether the responses of dollar denominated securities yen denominated securities the spot yen dollar exchange rate and the forward yen dollar exchange rate violate covered interest parity given the results of previous studies the evidence suggests that restrictions on capital mobility in japan have not allowed complete international integration of japanese financial markets

deficits money and inflation abstract this paper examines the interrelationships between monetary and fiscal policy specifically it seeks to determine whether government budget deficits influence monetary growth using a money supply model originally developed by barro we find that deficits have had a significant impact on the growth of the u s money supply throughout most of the period since 1961 such a relationship need not always hold it depends on whether government deficits place upward pressure on interest rates and whether the central bank monetizes the debt in an effort to stabilize interest rates

comparing time series and survey forecasts of weekly changes in money a methodological note measured as the difference between the announced change and the expected change derived from the money market services inc weekly survey of government securities dealers unlike other survey measures of expectations the most notable example of which is the livingston survey data these expectations are formed by active market participants consequently the survey s forecast made public before the fed s announcement of the actual change in the money stock is commonly thought to represent the market s expectation the concern in this paper is not with the impact of unanticipated money changes on nominal interest rates the purpose is to compare the relative forecasting abilities of the survey predictions and those obtained from a timeseries model this question is of interest because the weekly money series used in previous research includes certain abnormal weeks in which exogenous factors may significantly alter the series stochastic properties see for example cornell 1 urich and wachtel 9 thus the influence of these abnormal weeks weeks that include benchmark revisions changes in seasonal factors and weeks in which there is a social security effect is examined by comparing forecasting results for two samples one includes these weeks and the other deletes them following pearce 6 this approach allows us to test the hypothesis that the survey responses are at least weak form rational and to see how sensitive this test is to the sample of weeks used unlike previous studies we use two survey forecast series the median forecast made public prior to the announced change in ml and the mean series constructed from individual respondents forecasts zarnowitz s 10 examination of the asa nber survey forecasts indicates that the mean forecast is on average statistically superior to the median this finding is based on the idea that the mean forecast uses a more informationally diverse data set consequently it is

money supply announcements and interest rates does monetary policy matter abstract most current explanations of the effect of money supply announcements on the rate of interest center on central bank policy this paper analyzes a flexible price macroeconomic model where present and future monetary policy have no influence on either interest rates or real output but monetary data signal information about real economic activity which influences both short and long term real rates of interest the magnitude of the interest rate response is shown to depend on the difference in the income elasticities of currency and deposit demand and the relative size of monetary and real disturbances to the economy

optimal aggregation of money supply forecasts accuracy profitability and market efficiency we present a general procedure for aggregating expert forecasts which exploits regularities in the structure of information within the forecaster population specific information structures lead to aggregation methods which adjust for additive bias differences in individual accuracy and correlation among forecasts as an application we construct composite predictions of the weekly change in the money supply from forecasts made by twenty major securities dealers for which high positive correlation is found to be a significant characteristic due to instability in the information structure our methods cannot improve on the accuracy of a simple average in this case however they do capture information about the correlation among money supply forecasts which is not fully impounded in short term interest rates forecasts from our models accurately predict the direction of price changes for treasury bills and treasury bill futures after a money supply announcement the adjustment of prices to information in financial markets has been studied at length mostly from the perspective of the efficient markets hypothesis market efficiency tests typically look at the behavior of prices the end product

unanticipated interest rates bank stock returns and the nominal contracting hypothesis abstract the relationship between unexpected interest rate movements and bank stock returns is analyzed in the context of the nominal contracting hypothesis unanticipated changes in interest rates should influence individual bank profits and stock returns depending on the maturity characteristics of their assets relative to their liabilities this hypothesis is investigated by constructing portfolios on the basis of the nominal contracting positions of banks the main conclusion of this paper is that the wealth redistribution implications of the nominal contracting hypothesis is found to be unimportant in the determination of bank stock returns

balance of trade announcements and movements in exchange rates there is a growing literature on the effect of economic news on foreign exchange rates the effects of weekly money supply announcements on exchange rates have been empirically investigated by a number of researchers over a variety of periods 1 2 3 4 7 11 12 13 the response of foreign exchange rates to other types of economic information has also been studied for example dornbusch 5 uses innovations in the current account cyclical factors and interest rates frenkel 10 uses innovations in interest rate differentials edwards 6 uses innovations in money real output and real interest rates most recently hardouvelis 14 studies the market response of three interest rates and seven exchange rates to economic news on fifteen economic aggregates including monetary announcements inflation rate announcements and announcements reflecting the stage of the business cycle this paper studies short run movements in foreign exchange rates to the commerce department s monthly announcements of the u s balance of merchandise trade it extends previous studies of foreign exchange response to economic news in three ways first by studying the response to the trade announcement which occurs two months after the month to which the announcement refers the paper provides a more precise measure of the response to the news content of trade related announcements than earlier studies this for instance is an improvement over dornbusch s 5 definition of current account news as the innovation in the actual oecd organization for economic co operation and development biannual current account estimates second the paper studies not only movements in spot rates to the announcement but calculates the movements in forward premiums to this information by studying the response in forward premiums to the merchandise trade announcements the paper examines whether the information in the announcements implies effects that operate through capital flows and interest rates in addition to responses that operate through the flow of merchandise trade

stock prices and economic news this paper examines the daily response of stock prices to announcements about the money supply inflation real economic activity and the discountrate except for the discount rate survey data on market participants expectations of these announcements are used to identify the unexpected component of the announcements in order to test the efficient markets hypothesis that only the unexpected part of any announcement the surprise moves stock prices the empirical results support this hypothesis and indicate further that surprises related to monetary policy significantly affect stock prices there is only limited evidence of an impact from inflation surprises and no evidence of an impact from real activity surprises on the announcement days there is also only weak evidence of stock price responses to surprises beyond the announcement day this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the effects of inflation and money supply announcements on interest rates this paper examines the impact of the money supply and inflation rate announcements on interest rates survey data on expectations of the money supply and consumer and producer price indexes are used to distinguish anticipated and unanticipated components of the announcements this distinction is used to test for the efficiency of the financial market response to the announcements of new information the results indicate that the unanticipated components of the announced changes in the producers price index and in the money supply have an immediate positive effect on short term interest rates the consumer price index announcement has no apparent effect there is no evidence of a delayed announcement effect however there is some indication of a liquidity effect of the money supply change on interest rates this takes place when reserves are changing and several weeks prior to the information announcement the effect of money supply announcements on interest rates has attracted considerable attention in both the academic literature and the financial press in the last few years it has been firmly established that unanticipated increases in the money supply lead to immediate increases in interest rates however there are several competing explanations for this phenomenon in the literature in this paper we present some additional empirical evidence which helps to distinguish between two of these hypotheses the policy anticipations and inflationary expectations hypotheses by examining the effect of money supply and inflation announcements on interest rates the positive effect on interest rates of announcements of unanticipated increases in the money supply was demonstrated by urich and wachtel 9 grossman 3 and roley 5 the announcement effect was interpreted in our earlier paper as a policy anticipations effect and has been interpreted by others e g cornell 1 as an inflationary expectations effect since both effects are in the same direction it is difficult to distinguish between them without additional evidence the policy anticipations effect is simply that an unanticipated increase in the money supply causes financial market participants to expect that the federal reserve will tighten the monetary reins in order to offset the increase in anticipation of future tightening there is a tendency for interest rates to increase the inflationary expectations effect is that an unanticipated increase

domestic and international financial market responses to federal deficit announcements abstract this study examines the response of domestic and international financial variables to announced changes in federal deficit projections over the 1981 1994 period as observed in earlier studies rates on us treasury securities responded positively to announced increases in federal deficit projections new evidence shows that deficit effects are transmitted internationally with foreign long term interest rates also increasing in response to announced increases in us deficit projections the exchange value of the dollar tends to be positively related to announced changes in deficit projections but that result appears to be related to the degree of insulation of foreign financial markets from us financial markets finally the price of gold responded positively to announced changes in deficit projections taken together the results suggest that higher projected deficits raise real interest rates in part because of an increase in an inflation risk premium

the effect of tax enforcement on tax elasticities evidence from charitable contributions in france optimal tax formulas expressed in sufficient statistics are usually calibrated under the assumption that the relevant tax elasticities are unaffected by other available policy instruments in practice though tax authorities have many more instruments than the mere tax rates and tax elasticities are functions of all these policy instruments in this paper we provide evidence that tax elasticities are extremely sensitive to a particular policy instrument the level of tax enforcement we exploit a natural experiment that took place in france in 1983 when the tax administration tightened the requirements to claim charitable deductions the reform led to a substantial drop in the amount of contributions reported to the administration which can be credibly attributed to overreporting of charitable contributions before the reform rather than to a real change in giving behaviours we show that the reform was also associated with a substantial decline in the absolute value of the elasticity of reported contributions this finding allows us to partially identify the elasticity of overreporting contributions which is shown to be large and inferior to 2 in the lax enforcement regime we further show using bunching of taxpayers at kink points of the tax schedule that the elasticity of taxable income also experienced a significant decline after the reform our results suggest that optimizing the tax rate for a given tax elasticity when other policy instruments are not optimized can lead to misleading conclusions when tax authorities have another instrument that could set the tax elasticity itself at its optimal level as in kopczuk and slemrod 2002

reserves announcements and interest rates does monetary policy matter the author provides evidence on the perceived existence of strong liquidity effect the analysis is based on the response of the term structure of interest rates to the weekly federal reserve announcements of bank reserves during the post october 1979 period it is shown that unanticipated changes in the mix between borrowed and nonborrowed reserves cause expected real interest rates to change after the announcement because they provide information about a future change in the supply of money a precise model is developed and tested during subperiods of nonborrowed and borrowed reserves targeting by the fed

asset returns discount rate changes and market efficiency the primary purpose of this paper is to reconcile the previous findings of discount rate endogeneity with the presence of discount rate announcement effects in securities markets the crux of this reconciliation is the distinction between technical discount rate changes that are endogenous and nontechnical changes which contain some informative policy implications in essence we attempt to separate expected discount rate changes from unexpected changes or equivalently the expected component of discount rate changes from the unexpected component if markets are efficient the former should have no announcement effects while the latter may be associated with an announcement effect accordingly the focus of the empirical analysis is on the interaction between discount rate exogeneity the specific monetary policy regime and accouncement effects in addition we examine whether the behavior of these markets in the postannouncement period is consistent with the rapid price adjustment implied by market efficiency

impact of interest rate surprises on islamic and conventional stocks and bonds abstract this paper studies the impact of interest rate news surprises on islamic and conventional stock and bond indices using a dataset which covers interest rate announcements and forecasts as well as stock and bond indices in three islamic and eight non islamic countris we find that interest rate surprises tend to have a smaller impact on the returns and volatility of islamic than conventional bonds because islamic bonds are structured to avoid explicit interest rates however interest rate surprises have about the same or bigger impact on the returns and volatility of islamic relative to conventional stocks despite the low amounts of cash and debt holdings of firms comprising islamic stock indices

stock prices and the effective exchange rate of the dollar the literature on the relation between stock prices and exchange rates is very poor and includes few studies that have argued that exchange rate changes do effect stock prices by relying on the portfolio approach to exchange rate determination it is argued that a change in stock prices could also have an impact on exchange rates i e there could be a two way relationship between exchange rates and stock prices granger concept of causality as well as cointegration technique are employed to support this conjecture the empirical results show that there is bidirectional causality between stock prices measured by s p 500 index and the effective exchange rate of the dollar at least in the short run the cointegration analysis reveals that there is no long run relationship between two variables

poundm3 surprises and asset prices in this paper the relationship between unanticipated sterling m3 m3 and a variety of asset prices is investigated for part of the uk s experience with monetary targeting the unanticipated component of monetary growth is generated using money market services uk survey data and an arima model it is demonstrated that the uk survey data are rational in that they are an unbiased and efficient forecast and that the market efficiently incorporates unanticipated money growth into asset prices the sign of the unanticipated monetary component in our asset price equations tends to indicate that the fisher the inflation expectations hypothesis is better supported during the sample period

market response to the weekly money supply announcements in the 1970s the hypothesis that the weekly announcement of the money supply affects interest rates is examined the announcement effect is interpreted as a policy anticipation effect that is an unanticipated increase in the money supply leads to an increase in interest rates in anticipation of future tightening by the federal reserve estimates of this effect with proxies for the unanticipated change constructed from a survey of money supply forecasts and an arima model indicate that a financial markets respond very quickly to the announcement and b the response was largest when policymakers emphasized the importance of the monetary aggregates financial market participants are careful observers of the weekly money supply announcement and generally agree that the announcement often leads to changes in interest rates this occurs because the announcement leads market participants to revise their expectations both of future federal reserve policy actions and of future economic conditions in this paper we examine the response of yields on treasury bills to the announcement of the money supply and the extent to which that response has varied in the last ten years money supply announcements may affect market interest rates in three ways first actual expansion of the money supply leads to lower interest rates through a liquidity effect however rapid monetary growth which is not anticipated leads market participants to expect the federal reserve to counteract such growth in the future as a consequence there may be a policy anticipation effect which causes higher interest rates in anticipation of future tightening furthermore prolonged rapid monetary growth also creates inflation and inflationary expectations which lead to higher interest rates thus there may exist a third effect the inflationary expectations effect which also leads to higher interest rates our interest in this paper is in the immediate market response to the weekly announcement of the money supply which as we argue below is most likely to be a policy anticipation effect the policy anticipation effect is best described by example suppose that the announced change in the money supply exceeds that which was expected by

doing the right thing or doing the thing right allocating resources between marketing research and manufacturing matching production with sales potential is essential for survival in volatile markets manufacturing and marketing managers compete for staff space cash and other assets as they struggle both to determine what and how many products ought to be produced and to actually produce them we develop an analytical framework to answer one simple question how much marketing research should a firm do when it takes resources away from manufacturing the goods that generate revenue to understand the costs and benefits of marketing research we account for the lost opportunities to produce these goods some analytical findings are striking firms without initial knowledge of their potential customers should allocate one third of the firm s resources to marketing research the model suggests a host of issues to be more deeply studied by management scientists

syndicated euro credit sovereign risk assessments market efficiency and contagion effects this study investigates the informational efficiency of the syndicated euro credit market by analyzing the adjustment of spreads to news characterizing the state of sovereign borrowers creditworthiness in addition the potential for an interlinked crisis contagion effects between three major borrowing countries is examined that is contagion tests are conducted to see how news for one borrower affects the spreads charged to the others the evidence suggests that the euro credit pricing process has been informationally efficient however with respect to the contagion effects it was found that noncountry specific risk factors systematically influence country specific spreads

the reaction of spot and forward rates to new information abstract this paper examines the impact of new information on the term structure of exchange rates in particular the response of spot and forward exchange rates to anticipated and unanticipated weekly u s and canadian money growth announcements and the speed of adjustment of the foreign exchange market to these announcements are investigated the results indicate that the unanticipated component of the announced changes in the u s money supply has an immediate negative effect on the foreign value of the u s dollar this is entirely consistent with the assetmarket theory of exchange rate determination that postulates that exchange rates immediately adjust to reflect new information the response of the forward market however appears to be weaker lending support to the overshooting hypothesis

monetary policy and short term interest rates an efficient markets rational expectations approach this paper is an application of efficient markets rational expectations theory to analyze empirically the relationship of money supply growth and short term interest rates a hotly debated issue in the literature this approach has the advantage over earlier research on this subject in that it imposes a theoretical structure that allows easier interpretation of the empirical results as well as more powerful statistical tests the empirical results uniformly do not support the proposition that increases in money growth are correlated with declines in short rates the relationship between money supply growth and nominal interest rates is a hotly debated issue in the literature one view associated with keynesian structural macromodels has an increase in money growth leading at least in the short and medium runs to a decline in interest rates 2 an alternative view associated with milton friedman 6 7 indicates that interest rates might rise in response to higher money growth because there is a rise in inflationary expectations and hence a rise in interest rates through a fisher 5 effect

the policy anticipation hypothesis and the expected inflation hypothesis some new evidence using index linked bonds abstract using price index linked and conventional bonds issued by the uk government estimates of expected inflation and the expected real interest rate are derived these estimates are employed to investigate the relationship between components of the nominal interest rate and surprise monetary change the empirical results support the expected inflation hypothesis rather than the policy anticipation hypothesis

the effect of relative monetary surprises on spot exchange rates this paper examines the hypothetical relationship between us and canadian monetary surprises and the behaviour of us canadian spot exchange rates past studies have found that positive us monetary surprises were correlated with an appreciating us dollar in foreign exchange markets in this paper it is argued that monetary surprises in the us must be measured relative to foreign monetary innovation rather than in the conventional absolute sense when examining their impact on exchange markets rational investors consider expected returns and risk differentials in the us and local markets jointly in determining whether to be net buyers or sellers of us dollars the monetary actions of both the fed and the central bank operating in the local foreign economy will be considered in the foreign exchange market because of the close synchronization between the weekly money supply announcements in canada and the us it is possible to examine whether the relative or absolute us monetary surprise is more signifi

inflation s negative effects on real stock prices new evidence and a test of the proxy effect hypothesis the present study examines the effects of inflation on real stock prices using an error correction model of the s p 500 inflation is shown to have a negative and significant impact in a variety of model specifications the study also investigates whether the observed negative relation arises because inflation proxies for more fundamental relations between stock prices and either future output relative price uncertainty or inflation uncertainty the evidence reveals that inflation does not merely proxy for those other factors and thus the proxy effect hypothesis in its various forms is rejected

the signalling role of base and money announcements and their effects on interest rates abstract this paper demonstrates that unexpected changes in the announced monetary base have an impact on interest rates above and beyond the impact of unexpected changes in the announced money supply in addition both money supply and monetary base announcements are shown to have a significant signalling role for subsequent changes in monetary aggregates however in contrast to several leading hypotheses it appears that the observed link between monetary announcements and interest rates is not attributable to the signals that announcements provide about the subsequent behavior of money and the base

learning and the exchange rate exchange rate responses to money announcements in the early 1980s abstract the paper develops a monetary model of exchange rate determination with transitory monetary shocks and bayesian learning the model implies that exchange rate responses to monetary surprises are time varying and asymmetric furthermore the two variables become increasingly negatively correlated as beliefs converge an empirical section reexamines the evidence of dollar exchange rate responses to monetary announcements in the 1979 1984 period during which two monetary reforms took place in the usa there is strong support for the presence of learning behavior during the october 1979 to october 1982 period in the german mark and japanese yen equations

the impact of money on short term interest rates this study reviews empirical evidence from four research methods related to the impact of money on short term nominal rates the studies consistently fail to find evidence supporting the much hypothesized short term negative relationship between money and nominal rates since at least april 1975 reasons for the absence of a negative relationship include the tendency of financial markets to anticipate corrective action by the fed whenever ml deviates from targeted growth ranges and a rapid adjustment of inflationary expectations to changes in money growth

the structure of expectations of the weekly money supply announcement abstract this paper examines the structure of expectations of the weekly money supply announcement in the late 1970s the data used are from a weekly telephone survey of money market participants the rationality and structure of expectations are explored with the data organized in three ways the mean response to each weekly survey the pooled sample of individual responses and time series of responses by each individual in the survey the effect of data aggregation on rationality tests is investigated the structure of the expectations data are also examined and it is found that both strong regressive influences and adaptive learning characterize the data

discount rate changes and the foreign exchange market abstract changes in the discount rate can have associated announcement effects on the foreign exchange value of the dollar only if these changes are not anticipated by the market this paper provides evidence to support this contention specifically discount rate changes made for reasons other than technical adjustments have not been anticipated fully and consequently their announcements have had a significant impact on the dollar s exchange rate furthermore results are obtained that support the hypothesis that unanticipated discount rate changes alter inflationary expectations

the information content of weekly money supply announcements this paper analyzes the information content of weekly money supply announcements and the use of this information in the market determination of interest rates a short term rational expectations model of the financial market is constructed which incorporates the reaction of the federal reserve to deviations from target money supply and provides a context for analyzing the impact of announcements in the model the federal reserve attempts to maintain target growth rates in the money supply by compensating for past deviations from target announcements which contain an unanticipated movement in the money supply lead the public to expect that the federal reserve will change the rate of growth in the short run to compensate the revision of expectations about future short term money supply leads the public to revise their expectations about short term interest rates the implications of the model are empirically tested using data from a survey of expected changes in the money supply and u s treasury bill data the results support the implications of the model that is weekly money supply announcements do contain new information for the market determination of interest rates and it is only the unanticipated component of the announcement which is important

social security payments money supply announcements and interest rates abstract a monthly cycle existed in initially announced changes in seasonally adjusted m1 for a period extending at least from september 1977 to february 1984 this cycle was the source of systematic errors in the widely used money market services forecast of m1 such errors can induce a spurious relation between interest rates and expected changes in the money supply when the survey forecasts are corrected to eliminate systematic errors the apparent negative relation between interest rates and expected money supply changes disappears interest rates were not systematically related to either anticipated or unanticipated money supply changes during the period february 1984 to december 1986

the impact of macroeconomic surprises on spot and forward foreign exchange markets abstract this paper evaluates the effects of surprises in 23 types of macroeconomic announcements on foreign exchange rates and on the forward premium several findings emerge first as in the balance of payment framework announcements that convey a decline in consumer demand increase foreign exchange rates second the ppp hypothesis is rejected in favor of portfolio balance effects in determining exchange rates third the behavior of forward premiums is consistent with covered interest rate parity fourth exchange rates respond to announcements related to consumer demand inflation and interest rates but not to the announcements directly related to the general strength of the economy finally among the news releases considered surprises in the treasury budget trade balance and capacity utilization have the strongest influence in the currency market