How the Fed Moves Markets

Book excerpt: Central banks have a profound impact on financial markets, and investors struggle to keep informed about their complex policy decisions. Technological and financial developments have transformed the US Federal Reserve Bank from a financial black box into a vocal, increasingly transparent institution—and the result is such a wealth of textual data that clues to future policy decisions may be lost among the details. This book presents a solution to this problem by keeping track of those details. Schnidman and MacMillan demonstrate how the latest advances in automated text analysis, combined with the precision of domain expertise, are the keys to understanding how central banks move markets with their words. The authors outline a method to not only examine every piece of every central bank communication, but to do it in a way that is completely comprehensive and unbiased while quickly yielding hard, quantitative data that can be put to work in modern financial models.