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What does Monetary Policy do to Long-Term Interest Rates at the Zero Lower Bound? Jonathan H. Wright First Version: January 22, 2011 This version: November 2, 2011 Abstract The federal funds rate has been stuck at the zero bound for over two years and the Fed has turned to unconventional monetary policies, such as large scale asset purchases to provide stimulus to the economy. This paper uses a structural VAR with daily data to identify the e¤ects of monetary policy shocks on various longer-term interest rates during this period. The VAR is identi…ed using the assumption that monetary policy shocks are heteroskedastic: monetary policy shocks have especially high variance on days of FOMC meetings and certain speeches, while there is nothing unusual about these days from the perspective of any other shocks to the economy. A complementary high-frequency event- study approach is also used. I …nd that stimulative monetary policy shocks lower Treasury and corporate bond yields, but the e¤ects die o¤ fairly fast, with an estimated half-life of about two months. JEL Classi…cation: C22, E43, E58. Keywords: Monetary policy, Identi…cation, Quantitative easing, Zero lower bound, Vector Autoregression, Event study. Department of Economics, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD 21218; email@example.com. I am grateful to Tobias Adrian, Joseph Gagnon, Refet Gürkaynak and Eric Swanson for helpful discussions. All errors are my sole responsibility. 1 Introduction During the recent …nancial crisis, the Federal Reserve sharply lowered the target for the federal funds rate. In December 2008, the federal funds rate was set to the zero lower bound (more precisely in a target range from zero to 25 basis points), and has remained there since then. With monetary policy stuck at the zero bound, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) began using other, less conventional, ways to further stimulate aggregate demand. This included statements signaling that the funds rate would be kept at the zero bound for a long time, programs geared towards supporting certain critical credit markets that were frozen, such as the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility. And it included providing additional stimulus to the economy by large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) of Treasury securities and other high-grade bonds, a policy that is commonly referred to as quantitative easing. A key motivation for these purchases was to try to lower the interest rates being paid by households and businesses, so as to support consumption and investment spending. The rationale put forth by Federal Reserve o¢ cials mainly relies on a preferred habitat paradigm, as envisioned by Modigliani and Sutch (1966, 1967) and more recently by Vayanos and Vila (2009) in which markets are segmented, investors demand bonds of a speci…c type, and the interest rate is determined by the supply and demand of bonds of that particular type (Kohn (2009)). The LSAPs could also work in other ways, such as by a¤ecting agents' expectations of the future course of monetary policy. Nearly three years after the overnight rate hit the zero bound, there is a rapidly- growing literature on assessing the e¤ects of the unconventional monetary policies that have been used over this period. Important contributions include Doh (2010), Amico and King (2010), Gagnon et al. (2010), Hamilton and Wu (2010), Neely D' 1 (2010), Hancock and Passmore (2011) and Krishnamurthy and Vissing-Jorgenson (2011). Also, Swanson (2011) reexamined Operation Twist from the 1960s using an event-study perspective, and compared it to the unconventional monetary policies presently being employed by the Federal Reserve. Measuring the e¤ects of monetary policy shocks in this environment however poses special challenges. In normal times, the federal funds rate measures the stance of t monetary policy. But things are murkier at the zero bound. There isn' as clean a single measure of the overall stance of unconventional monetary policy. And while one s could proxy the stance of monetary policy by the size of the Fed' balance sheet, with forward-looking …nancial markets, one would expect a policy of asset purchases to impact asset prices not at the time that the purchases are actually made, but rather at the time that investors learn that they will take place. LSAPs are announced ahead of time, in the statements that follow FOMC meetings. These statements are in turn anticipated to some extent by investors, whose expectations have been guided by speeches and other comments by FOMC members. Furthermore, whereas the federal funds futures market gives a fairly clear measure of investors'real-time expectations for changes in the target federal funds rate, there is no such measure of expectations of the size of LSAPs. In this paper, I propose measuring the e¤ects of monetary policy shocks during this period of unconventional monetary policy using a structural vector autoregression (VAR) in …nancial variables at the daily frequency, employing the methodology of Rigobon (2003) and Rigobon and Sack (2003, 2004, 2005). The idea is to identify days on which the variance of monetary policy shocks was especially high, during the period when the federal funds rate was stuck at the zero bound and unconventional approaches monetary policy were being deployed. These are days of FOMC meetings and days with other announcements that apparently altered investors'views about the 2 likely extent of monetary policy actions. Comparing the variance-covariance matrix of VAR innovations on these and other days enables identi…cation of the e¤ects of these monetary policy shocks. In principle, this goes back to the idea of measuring monetary policy shocks in a VAR of Sims (1980), Bernanke (1986) and Christiano, Eichenbaum and Evans (1996), but it does so without tying monetary policy decisions to the level of the target federal funds rates. But unlike the earlier VAR literature, identi…cation does not depend on the standard short-run zero restrictions. Instead, this is an identi…cation strategy using heteroskedasticity in daily-frequency data. It should be emphasized that this approach addresses a somewhat di¤erent ques- tion from the analysis of the e¤ects of LSAPs by Gagnon et al. (2010), Krishnamurthy and Vissing-Jorgenson (2011) and other authors. My approach here identi…es policy shocks from the total e¤ect of FOMC-related news on a set of asset prices during this period of unconventional monetary policy. FOMC statements could impact asset prices via LSAPs— LSAPs are surely the dominant tool of monetary policy when the economy is stuck at the zero bound. But FOMC statements could also work in other ways, such as by signaling that the federal funds rate will be kept low (over and above the signaling e¤ect of LSAPs), or even by changing agents'beliefs about the under- lying state of the economy (if they think that the Fed has some private information). The proposed methodology measures the total e¤ects of FOMC news and cannot dis- entangle the e¤ects of these di¤erent channels. Of course, the separate identi…cation of the e¤ects of di¤erent FOMC statements is an important question. Nonetheless, the structural VAR approach considered here brings some important advantages. It circumvents the di¢ culties in measuring market expectations for Fed statements— it t isn' necessary to specify what the markets learned from Fed statements, it is only necessary to specify the times at which a signi…cant news came out, a much easier task. It allows for the possibility that other shocks occurred on the same days as 3 the monetary policy shocks. And it provides an estimate of the persistence of the monetary policy shocks, which the standard event-study methodology cannot do. Over the period since November 2008, I estimate that monetary policy shocks have a signi…cant e¤ect on ten-year yields and long-maturity corporate bond yields that wear o¤ over the next few months. The e¤ect on two-year Treasury yields is very small. The initial e¤ect on corporate bond yields is a bit more than half as large as the e¤ect on ten-year Treasury yields. This …nding is important as it shows that the news about purchases of Treasury securities had e¤ects that were not limited to the Treasury yield curve. That is, the monetary policy shocks not only impacted Treasury rates, but were also transmitted to private yields which have a more direct bearing on economic activity. There is slight evidence of a rotation in breakeven rates from Treasury In‡ation Protected Securities (TIPS), with short-term breakevens rising and long-term forward breakevens falling. The plan for the remainder of this paper is as follows. Section 2 discusses the methodology and the identifying assumptions. Section 3 describes the data and re- ports the results of the empirical work. Section 4 discusses a closely-related "event- study" approach that relates the VAR errors to monetary policy surprises measured using high-frequency intradaily data in small windows that bracket the announce- ment times. This alternative methodology ends up giving consistent results, but with estimates that are somewhat more precise. Section 5 concludes. 2 The Method I assume that a px1 vector of yields, Yt , has the reduced form VAR representation A(L)Yt = + "t (1) 4 where "t denote the reduced form forecast errors. I further assume that these reduced form errors can be related to a set of underlying structural shocks p "t = i=1 Ri i;t (2) where i;t is the ith structural shock, Ri is a px1 vector, and the structural shocks are independent of each other and over time. The parameters A(L), and fRi gp i=1 are all assumed to be constant. The monetary policy shock is ordered …rst but this is for notational convenience only. The ordering of variables is irrelevant as a Choleski decomposition will not be 2 used for identi…cation. The monetary policy shock has mean zero and variance 1 2 on announcement days, and variance 0 on all other days, while all other structural shocks are identically distributed with mean zero and variance 1 on all dates. The 2 2 identifying assumption is that 0 6= 1. Put another way, the identifying assumption is that news about monetary policy comes out in a lumpy manner, and the days on which it comes out are determined by accident of the calendar; and so the volatility of other structural shocks should be identical on these and other days. This strategy of identi…cation through heteroskedasticity was …rst proposed by Rigobon (2003) and applied to asset price data by Rigobon and Sack (2003, 2004, 2005), becoming quite popular in the identi…cation of structural VARs since then. Let 0 and 1 denote the variance-covariance matrices of reduced form errors on non-announcement and announcement days, respectively. Clearly, 0 2 0 2 0 2 2 1 0 = R1 R1 1 R1 R1 0 = R1 R1 ( 1 0) (3) This allows R1 to be identi…ed. Without loss of generality, I adopt the normalization 5 2 2 0 2 2 that 1 0 = 1, as R1 R1 and ( 1 0) are not separately identi…ed. I am seeking only to identify the e¤ects of monetary policy shocks, not the other structural shocks in the VAR ( 2 ; ::: p ), therefore imposing further structure on the system is not needed. The econometric strategy is to estimate the VAR and construct the sample variance- covariance matrices of residuals on non-announcement and announcement days, re- spectively, ^ 0 and ^ 1 . Then the parameters in the vector R1 can be estimated by solving the minimum distance problem ^ R1 = arg min[vech( ^ 1 ^ 0) ^ ^ vech(R1 R1 )]0 [V0 + V1 ] 1 [vech( ^ 1 0 ^ 0) 0 vech(R1 R1 )] R1 (4) ^ ^ where V0 and V1 are estimates of the variance-covariance matrices of vech( ^ 0 ) and vech( ^ 1 ), respectively. Estimates of the impulse responses can then be traced out. This leaves the question of statistical inference. Use of the bootstrap may help to mitigate concerns about statistical inference in a small sample size. I do bootstrap inference in three parts. First, I want to test the hypothesis that announcement and non-announcement days are no di¤erent: that 0 = 1. I do this using the test statistic [vech( ^ 1 ^ ^ ^ 0 )]0 [V0 + V1 ] 1 [vech( ^ 1 ^ 0 )] (5) and comparing it to a distribution in which announcement and non-announcement days are randomly scrambled, so that the two variance-covariance matrices are equal by construction under the null in the bootstrap samples. Rejection of this null hy- pothesis means that the identi…cation condition is satis…ed. Second, I want to conduct inference on the structural impulse responses, given that they are identi…ed. As the data are persistent, I use the bias-adjusted bootstrap of Kilian (1998), except that instead of resampling from individual vectors of residuals, 6 I use the stationary bootstrap (Politis and Romano (1994)) to resample blocks of residuals of expected length of 10 days. This means that the bootstrap should preserve some of the volatility clustering that is evident in the original data.1 This allows con…dence intervals for the impulse responses to be constructed. This bias adjustment is also applied to the point estimates. Finally, this same bootstrap can be used to test the hypothesis that 1 0 = 0 R1 R1 , in other words that there is a single monetary policy shock. This is done by comparing the test statistic [vech( ^ 1 ^ 0) ^ ^0 ^ vech(R1 R1 )]0 [V0 + V1 ] 1 [vech( ^ 1 ^ ^ 0) ^ ^0 vech(R1 R1 )] (6) to the distribution from the bias-adjusted bootstrap.2 3 Data and Results In the baseline implementation of this method, I use daily data on six di¤erent interest rates from the period November 3 2008 to September 30 2011. These are the two- and ten-year nominal Treasury zero-coupon yields from the data set of Gürkaynak, Sack and Wright (2007), the …ve-year TIPS breakeven3 and the …ve-to-ten-year forward TIPS breakeven, from the data set of Gürkaynak, Sack and Wright (2010) and the s Moody' indices of BAA and AAA corporate bond yields (not spreads). A VAR (1) was …tted to these data. Table 1 shows the list of 28 monetary policy announcement days. The criterion 1 Simply resampling from the residuals in the usual way would however give very similar results. 2 ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ More precisely, if ^ 0 , ^ 1 , R1 , V0 and V1 denote the bootstrap analogs of ^ 0 , ^ 1 , R1 , V0 ^ ^ ^ and V1 , respectively, then the bootstrap simulates the distributions of 0 [V0 + V1 ] 1 where = ^ ^ vech( ^ 1 ^ 0 ) vech(R1 R10 ) (vech( ^ 1 ^ 0 ) vech(R1 R1 )). ^ ^0 3 This is the spread between a nominal and TIPS bond, also known as in‡ ation compensation. It is in‡ uenced by expected in‡ ation, the in‡ation risk premium, and the TIPS liquidity premium. 7 for inclusion in this list is that it be either the day of any FOMC meeting during the period in which monetary policy was stuck at the zero bound,4 or the day of another announcement or speech by Chairman Bernanke that was seen as especially germane to the prospects for unconventional monetary policy. One might of course include days of other speeches, or releases of FOMC minutes. I did not do so, because it is important that the estimation of the variance-covariance matrix on announcement days is not contaminated with days on which there is only trivial or indirect news about unconventional monetary policy; that will only blunt the distinction between the two variance-covariance matrices that is crucial to identi…cation. The days listed in Table 1 span the …rst period of quantitative easing (QE1), during which time the Fed bought a range of assets including a large volume of mortgage backed securities, the second period of quantitative easing (QE2), which involved Treasury purchases alone, and what I refer to as the third period of quantitative easing s (QE3) that included the extension of the maturity of the Fed' Treasury holdings as well as the reinvestment of maturing mortgage backed securities. Within the 28 days listed in Table 1, 13 of them are days that seem especially important— they are days around the start of the …rst, second and third phases of quantitative easing. These especially important announcement days are marked in bold. The variance-covariance matrix of reduced form errors was then estimated over the 28 announcement days, and over non-announcement days. The method described in the previous section was then used to estimate R1 , the contemporaneous e¤ects of a monetary policy shock on yields. The resulting impulse responses function estimates and 90 percent bootstrap con…- 4 December 16, 2008 was included. This was the day of the FOMC meeting at which the funds rate was set at zero, but the statement also included discussion of LSAPs. The unscheduled FOMC meeting of May 9, 2010 (after which a statement related to foreign exchange swaps was released) is not included because it has no direct bearing on domestic monetary policy. 8 dence intervals in this baseline VAR are reported in Figure 1. The identi…ed monetary policy shock is normalized to lower ten-year yields by 25 basis points instantaneously. The shock lowers AAA and BAA rates, by about half as much as the drop in ten- year Treasury yields. These e¤ects tend to wear o¤ over time fairly fast— the impulse responses on ten-year Treasuries and corporate yields are statistically signi…cant, but only for a short time. The half-life of the estimated impulse responses for Treasury and corporate yields is two or three months. Two-year yields fall, but the e¤ect is mod- est.5 Short-term breakeven rates rise slightly, while longer-term forward breakeven rates fall, but these e¤ects are not statistically signi…cant. The estimates of the ini- tial e¤ects are mostly consistent with the evidence from event studies. For example, Krishnamurthy and Vissing-Jorgenson (2011) found that quantitative easing policies lower long-term Treasuries and the highest rated corporate bonds, and report some evidence that breakeven rates rise. They however found that quantitative easing has negligible e¤ects on BAA rates. The top panel of Table 2 reports the results of comparing the test statistics in equations (5) and (6) with their bootstrap p-values in this baseline VAR. The null hypothesis that the reduced form variance-covariance matrix is the same on announce- ment and non-announcement days is rejected. The null hypothesis that the di¤erence 0 between the two variance-covariance matrices can be factored in the form R1 R1 is not rejected. That indicates that the data can be well characterized by a single monetary policy shock. The structural VAR approach measures the monetary policy shock directly from its e¤ects on interest rates. As noted in the introduction, this has a number of advan- 5 Obviously over this period, monetary policy shocks could have no e¤ect on the federal funds rate or other very short-term interest rates by construction. But the two-year yield was not at the zero bound (it averaged 81 basis points over the sample), and so monetary policy surprises could conceivably have had some e¤ect on this. However, it turns out that the e¤ect is small. 9 tages: expectations do not have to be measured, and dynamic e¤ects can be traced out. However, it also has a number of limitations. In particular, it is silent on the relative contribution of di¤erent aspects of unconventional monetary policy (forward looking guidance about the federal funds rate, LSAPs etc.). Nevertheless, looking at the evidence here in conjunction with other studies that have considered the e¤ects of asset purchases more directly, and also noting that the main e¤ect of monetary policy shocks during the crisis is on long-term interest rates, while short-term interest rates are little changed, it seems reasonable to surmise that LSAPs represent an important component of these identi…ed policy shocks. 3.1 Robustness checks and extensions This subsection reports the results of three types of extensions and robustness checks. First, the analysis is redone using the more stringent de…nition of the announcement dates (only the announcement days marked in bold in Table 1). This should make the di¤erence between policy and non-policy dates starker, potentially helping identi…ca- tion. Impulse response estimates are shown in Figure 2. The results are quite similar to those in Figure 1, except that the impulse responses are a little more precisely estimated in this case. The second robustness check is for the sample period chosen to estimate the VAR. The baseline VAR is estimated over a short sample period. A natural alternative is to consider estimating the reduced form parameters in A(L) over the period since January 1999 (when the TIPS yields are …rst available), while continuing to estimate 0 and 1 on non-announcement and announcement days starting in November 2008. This gives the potential bene…t of greater e¢ ciency, although at the potential cost of having to impose the same coe¢ cients of the VAR in the crisis and pre-crisis periods. 10 The results of this exercise are shown in Figure 3. They are again qualitatively similar to those shown in Figure 1, but the impulse responses are a little more precisely estimated. I also consider an alternative speci…cation for the set of variables included in the VAR, replacing the corporate bond yields with the yield on current-coupon thirty- year Fannie Mae mortgage backed securities.6 The results of this exercise are shown in Figure 4. The monetary policy shock that lowers ten-year Treasury yields by 25 basis points is estimated to lower MBS rates by about 15 basis points. The e¤ect is statistically signi…cant for a couple of months, but the e¤ect again wears o¤ fairly quickly. This paper does not di¤erentiate between the …rst, second and third phases of quantitative easing. However, QE1 involved heavy purchases of MBS, whereas QE2 entailed purchases of Treasuries only, while QE3 involved elements of both. It seems reasonable to surmise that if one were able separately to identify monetary policy shocks in these subperiods, then the sensitivity of MBS rates would be bigger in QE1 than in QE2.7 As a …nal robustness check, I redo the baseline results except that instead of estimating the VAR by OLS, I estimate the VAR as the posterior mean using the Minnesota prior.8 This imposes shrinkage towards the prior that all the variables are univariate random walks, and so represents another way to address the potential concern about the downward bias in VAR estimates of persistence. The results, shown 6 Current coupon securities are benchmark mortgage backed securities (MBS). Naturally one would be most interested in actual mortgage rates, rather than the yields on MBS, from the perspec- tive of assessing the ability of monetary policy to support the housing market. However, mortgage rates are not available at the daily frequency, and so MBS rates are the best available substitute for use in this paper. 7 In other (not reported) robustness checks, I considered trivariate VARs with two- and ten-year nominal Treasury yields plus one other interest rate (a breakeven rate, a corporate bond yield, or the MBS yield). These VARs again gave similar results, though in some cases the con…dence intervals were a bit tighter. 8 The Minnesota prior (Doan, Litterman and Sims (1984)) shrinks the VAR towards the series being independent random walks. In my implementation, the shrinkage parameter is set to 1. 11 in Figure 5, are again broadly similar to those in Figure 1, except that the monetary policy shock is now estimated to have an e¤ect on corporate yields that is about as big as the e¤ect on ten-year Treasuries. Table 2 includes the speci…cation tests of the hypotheses that 0 = 1 and that 0 1 0 can be factored into the form R1 R1 for the alternative de…nition of announce- ment dates, the alternative sample period for estimating A(L), the alternative choices of variables in the VAR, and using the Minnesota prior to estimate the VAR. In all four cases, the hypothesis that announcement and non-announcement days are equiv- alent is rejected, while the hypothesis of a single monetary policy shock is accepted. 3.2 Avoiding estimating the VAR An alternative approach is to avoid estimating a VAR altogether, and instead simply assume that the expectation of each interest rate on day t is well approximated s by it' value on day t 1. This means that the one-step-ahead forecast errors, "t , can simply be approximated by Yt . The di¤erence between the variance-covariance matrix of Yt on announcement and non-announcement days can again be factored as in equation (3), giving estimates of the instantaneous impulse responses of the monetary policy shock. However, in avoiding estimating a VAR, this approach gives up on trying to estimate the impulse responses at longer horizons. Indeed this approach of treating the daily …rst di¤erences as approximate reduced form errors was employed by Rigobon and Sack (2005). The results are shown in Table 3. The size of the monetary policy shock is normal- ized to be one that lowers ten-year Treasury yields by 25 basis points. It generates causes a small and not quite statistically signi…cant drop in two-year yields, and signi…cantly lowers corporate bond yields. The instantaneous impulse responses are 12 qualitatively similar to those from estimating the VAR by OLS, although the point estimate of the impact on corporate yields is a bit larger, and close to the point es- t timate when estimating the VAR using the Minnesota prior. This isn' surprising, since the Minnesota prior shrinks towards the series being random walks. 4 Event-study methodology and intradaily data Identi…cation through heteroskedasticity collapses to the event-study methodology in the limiting case that the announcement windows contain only the shocks that we wish to identify– s that is, when the variances of all other shocks are negligible. That' a stronger assumption, and is surely not reasonable using daily data, especially over this turbulent period, but it might be an adequate approximation when high-frequency intradaily data are used. To consider an event-study methodology, I took quotes on the front contracts on two-, …ve-, ten- and thirty-year bond futures trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) from Tickdata. Table 1 shows the times of each of the announcements. The monetary policy shock is computed as the …rst principal component of yield changes9 from 15 minutes before each of these announcements to 1 hour and 45 minutes afterwards, re-scaled to have a standard deviation of one, and signed so that a positive surprise represents falling yields.10 No macroeconomic news announcements occurred in any of these windows and so it seems reasonable to assume that the monetary policy shock was the overwhelming driver of asset prices in these time periods. Unlike in the event studies of Gagnon et al. (2010) and 9 Yield changes were constructed as returns on the futures contract divided by the duration of the cheapest-to-deliver security in the deliverable basket. 10 This is a fairly wide window, but results are similar using a tighter window from 15 minutes before the announcement to 15 minutes afterwards. However, the announcements considered represent the interpretation of statements and speeches, as opposed to giving information about the numerical value of the target funds rate. Consequently, it seems natural to allow a relatively wide window for the market to digest the news. 13 Krishnamurthy and Vissing-Jorgenson (2011), the monetary policy surprises are being measured directly from intraday changes in asset prices. The approach here is similar in spirit to that of Gürkaynak, Sack and Swanson (2005). These authors recognized that FOMC statements contained both news about the current setting of the federal funds rate and about its likely future trajectory. Following many other papers (going back to Kuttner (2001)), they proposed using current and next-month federal funds futures quotes to measure the surprise compo- nent of the setting of the target federal funds rate— their key innovation was that they proposed using the orthogonal change in four-quarter-ahead eurodollar futures rates as an asset-price-based quanti…cation of the separate information in the statement about the outlook for monetary policy going forward. They called these the target and path surprises. However, since December 2008, there have been no surprises in the target federal funds rate, and FOMC statements have done little to monetary policy expectations over the next few quarters. Under these circumstances, it seems perhaps more appropriate to use changes in longer-term interest rates as an asset-price-based quanti…cation of monetary policy surprises during this period of unconventional pol- icy.11 This directly resolves the problem faced by event studies such as Gagnon et al. (2010) and Krishnamurthy and Vissing-Jorgenson (2011) that they did not have data on market expectations concerning the size of LSAPs. Table 4 reports the slope coe¢ cients from regressions of various yield changes and asset price returns onto the monetary policy surprises, measured as described in the previous paragraph, over the 28 days listed in Table 1. The left-hand-side variables are not limited to the variables considered in the VAR. Note that in these regressions, whereas the right-hand-side variable is constructed using high-frequency 11 Another option would be to use intradaily changes in longer-term eurodollar futures quotes, but these are quite illiquid at maturities beyond a year or two, and so the use of Treasury futures is preferable. 14 intradaily data; the left-hand side variables are daily changes, except for stock index futures, which are available intradaily.12 A one standard deviation monetary policy surprise is estimated to lower ten-year Treasury yields by 12 basis points. For comparison, Gürkaynak, Sack and Swanson (2005) estimated that over a period before monetary policy hit the zero bound, it would take a 100 basis point surprise cut in the target funds rate to lower ten-year Treasury yields by about this much. In Table 4, corporate bond yields are estimated to fall by about 7 basis points (a bit more than half as much as the decline in ten- year Treasury yields), while two-year Treasury yields again fall only a little. There is a rotation of TIPS breakevens, with …ve-year breakevens rising and …ve-to-ten-year forward breakevens falling. A possible interpretation is that the stronger outlook for demand boosts the short-to-medium-run in‡ation outlook, but the fact that the LSAPs are overwhelmingly concentrated in nominal (rather than TIPS) securities has an o¤setting e¤ect, pushing longer-term breakevens lower. A one standard deviation monetary policy surprise is estimated to lower Canadian, UK and German ten-year government bond yields13 by one-third to one-half as much as the decline in ten-year US Treasury yields–this indicates that the monetary policy actions have impacted global expectations for short-term interest rates and/or global risk premia, consistent with Neely (2010). Rates on current coupon thirty-year Fannie Mae mortgage backed securities fall about 7 basis points. Stock prices rise; a monetary policy surprise that lowers ten-year yields by 12 basis points is estimated to boost stock returns by a bit over half a percentage point14 . All of these e¤ects are highly statistically 12 These are returns on the S&P futures contract trading on the CME from Tickdata, from 15 minutes before each announcement to 1 hour and 45 minutes afterwards. 13 These are zero-coupon yields obtained at the daily frequency from the websites of the Bank of Canada, Bank of England and Bundesbank, respectively. 14 For comparison, Bernanke and Kuttner (2005) estimated that, before the zero bound was reached, an unanticipated 25 basis point surprise reduction of the federal funds rate raised stock prices by about 1 percent. 15 signi…cant, even though the left-hand-side variable is measured at the daily frequency in most cases, and even though the sample size is just 28 observations. The SMB factor of Fama and French (returns on small stocks less returns on big stocks) is not signi…cantly a¤ected, consistent with the …nding by some researchers that in recent decades size does not seem to be a priced risk factor in equity markets any more15 . But the monetary policy shock does signi…cantly increase the HML factor (returns on value stocks less returns on growth stocks). Perhaps …rms with high ratios of book value to market value are most sensitive to the credit channel of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. I also regressed the estimated reduced form errors from the daily VAR (equation (1)) onto these monetary policy shocks. The coe¢ cients are interpreted as estimates of R1 in equation (2), and in conjunction with the estimates of the VAR slope coe¢ cients in A(L), this allows the e¤ects of the monetary policy shock on the variables in the VAR to be traced out.16 The resulting impulse responses are shown in Figure 6, along with 90 percent con…dence intervals, using the bootstrap procedure de…ned in section 2.17 Figure 7 reports the results from the same exercise, but with the more stringent de…nition of announcement days (as in Figure 2). Likewise, Figures 8-10 are the analogs of Figures 3-5, but using this event-study approach. The results in Figures 6-10 are quite similar to those from Figure 1-5, but the con…dence intervals are generally a lot tighter.18 The monetary policy shock is estimated to lower long- 15 See, for example, Amihud (2002). 16 The idea of identifying a VAR using an auxiliary dataset at higher frequency than the VAR observations was proposed in other contexts by Faust, Swanson and Wright (2004) and Bernanke and Kuttner (2005). 17 The bootstrap also resamples the intradaily monetary policy surprises— for each bootstrap resid- ual corresponding to an announcement day, I take the intradaily monetary policy surprise for that day. The set of bootstrap residuals are regressed on the set of bootstrap monetary policy surprises to obtain the bootstrap estimate of R1 . 18 Note that the impulse responses at horizon 0 in Figures 6-10 give the estimates of R1 : These are not quite the same as the estimates reported in Table 4. The parameters in R1 are estimated by regressing the reduced form errors in the VAR on the monetary policy shocks; Table 4 instead 16 term Treasury and corporate bond yields, with the e¤ect wearing o¤ over time but remaining statistically signi…cant for a few months. The half-life of the estimated impulse responses is two or three months. The e¤ect on two-year Treasury yields is again small. Short-term breakevens rise, and long-term forward breakevens fall, perhaps for the reasons discussed above, with these e¤ects being on the borderline of statistically signi…cance. Table 5 shows the monetary policy surprises for each announcement day, esti- mated using high-frequency intradaily data, as proposed in this section. The state- ment accompanying the March 2009 FOMC meeting (indicating heavy asset pur- chases) corresponds to nearly a 4 standard deviation monetary policy surprise. The estimates in Figures 6-10 would suggest that this lowered ten-year Treasury yields by roughly 50 basis points on impact. Krishnamurthy and Vissing-Jorgenson (2011) consider that the statements accompanying the August, September and November 2010 FOMC meetings collectively revealed the essence of the information about QE2. Much information about QE2 came out at times other than these FOMC meetings19 and so I would be skeptical of simply adding up the responses to these particular three events to attempt to measure the total e¤ect of this particular monetary program. If one does so anyway, the three FOMC announcements sum up to a 1.3 standard deviation surprise. The estimates in Figures 6-10 indicate that a 1.3 standard devia- tion monetary policy surprise should lower ten-year Treasury yields by about 15 basis points on impact. Of course, judging by the impulse responses in this paper, all these e¤ects wore regresses daily (or intradaily) returns or yield changes on those monetary policy shocks. However, the estimates of R1 and the estimates reported in Table 4 are fairly close. 19 For example, the Fed was reported to have sent a survey to primary dealers asking them to estimate the size of QE2 in late October 2010. The survey form supplied three options: $250 billion, $500 billion and $1 trillion. The very fact of setting up the survey question in this way was a signal that dealers surely did not miss. 17 o¤ over the subsequent months. 5 Conclusions In response to the …nancial crisis and the ensuing deep recession, the Federal Reserve pushed the federal funds rate to the zero lower bound and began engaging in unortho- dox monetary policies, notably large-scale asset purchases. This paper has proposed using the tools of identi…cation through heteroksedasticity and high-frequency event- study analysis to measure the e¤ects of monetary policy shocks on the con…guration of interest rates when the conventional tool of monetary policy is stuck at the zero bound. Monetary policy shocks are estimated to have e¤ects on both long-term Trea- sury and corporate bond yields that are generally statistically signi…cant, with the e¤ects fading fairly fast over the subsequent months. The VAR does not measure e¤ects of shocks on low-frequency macroeconomic ag- gregates. But having estimates of the e¤ects of monetary policy shocks on asset prices may be helpful for exercises calibrating the impact of these shocks within macroceo- nomic models. For example, Chung et al. (2011) simulated the e¤ect of QE2 in the s Federal Reserve' FRB/US model. Their simulation assumed that QE2 lowered Trea- sury term premia by 25 basis points, but had no direct e¤ect on spreads of corporate and mortgage rates over their Treasury counterparts. Meanwhile, in FRB/US, the stronger economic outlook induced by lower term premia endogenously causes corpo- rate and mortgage rates to fall by more than the drop in Treasury yields. The evidence in the present paper would suggest that Chung et al. overstates the support to ag- gregate demand because I …nd that monetary policy surprises had smaller e¤ects on private sector rates than on Treasury yields. Also, I …nd that the e¤ects of the policy shocks wear o¤ faster than Chung et al. assumed. To the extent that longer term 18 interest rates are important for aggregate demand, unconventional monetary policy at the zero bound has had a stimulative e¤ect on the economy, but it may have been quite modest. 19 Table 1: Dates of Monetary Policy Announcements at the Zero Bound Date Event Time 11/25/2008 Fed Announces Purchases of MBS and Agency Bonds 08:15 12/1/2008 Bernanke states Treasuries may be purchased 13:45 12/16/2008 FOMC Meeting 14:15 1/28/2009 FOMC Meeting 14:15 3/18/2009 FOMC Meeting 14:15 4/29/2009 FOMC Meeting 14:15 6/24/2009 FOMC Meeting 14:15 8/12/2009 FOMC Meeting 14:15 9/23/2009 FOMC Meeting 14:15 11/4/2009 FOMC Meeting 14:15 12/16/2009 FOMC Meeting 14:15 1/27/2010 FOMC Meeting 14:15 3/16/2010 FOMC Meeting 14:15 4/28/2010 FOMC Meeting 14:15 6/23/2010 FOMC Meeting 14:15 8/10/2010 FOMC Meeting 14:15 8/27/2010 Bernanke Speech at Jackson Hole 10:00 9/21/2010 FOMC Meeting 14:15 10/15/2010 Bernanke Speech at Boston Fed 08:15 11/3/2010 FOMC Meeting 14:15 12/14/2010 FOMC Meeting 14:15 1/26/2011 FOMC Meeting 14:15 3/15/2011 FOMC Meeting 14:15 4/27/2011 FOMC Meeting 12:30 6/2/2011 FOMC Meeting 12:30 8/9/2011 FOMC Meeting 14:15 8/26/2011 Bernanke Speech at Jackson Hole 10:00 9/21/2011 FOMC Meeting 14:15 Notes: This Table lists the days that are treated as "announcement days" for the identi…cation strategy considered in this paper. It consists of all FOMC meetings during the period when the federal funds rate is stuck at the zero bound, and the days of certain important speeches and announcements concerning large-scale asset purchases. Announcement days that are treated as especially important are marked in bold. Times are in all cases Eastern time. 20 Table 2: Speci…cation tests Hypothesis Wald Statistic Bootstrap p-value Baseline VAR: All Announcement Days 0 = 1 67.9 0.005 0 1 0 = R1 R1 32.7 0.852 Baseline VAR: Ten Most Important Announcement Days 0 = 1 146.8 0.000 0 1 0 = R1 R1 112.6 0.519 Baseline VAR: Longer Estimation Period 0 = 1 72.7 0.001 0 1 0 = R1 R1 40.7 0.583 Alternative VAR with MBS rates 0 = 1 57.7 0.005 0 1 0 = R1 R1 30.8 0.383 Alternative VAR with CDS-based corporate yield 0 = 1 67.8 0.005 0 1 0 = R1 R1 33.2 0.568 Notes: This table reports the results of speci…cation tests of the hypotheses that the variance-covariance matrix of reduced form errors is the same on announcement and non-announcement days, and that there is a one-dimensional structural shock that characterizes the di¤erence between these two sets of days. Bootstrap p-values, constructed as described in the text, are included in both cases. Results are shown both for the cases where all days listed in Table 1 are treated as announcement days, and for cases where only the ten most important days, listed in bold in Table 1, are treated as announcement days. 21 Table 3: Estimates of the instantaneous e¤ects of monetary policy surprises from one-day changes in interest rates Estimate Con…dence Interval Ten-year Treasuries -0.25 -0.25 -0.25 Two-year Treasuries -0.04 -0.16 0.01 Five-year Breakevens -0.01 -0.10 0.13 Five-to-ten year forward breakevens -0.15 -0.20 0.14 AAA Yields -0.27 -0.36 -0.07 BAA Yields -0.27 -0.38 -0.07 Notes: This table reports the instantaneous e¤ects of monetary policy surprises tak- ing one day changes in interest rates as the reduced form forecast errors in the sys- tem consisting of two- and ten-year Treasury yields, …ve and …ve-to-ten-year forward breakevens and AAA and BAA yields. The variance-covariance matrices of these one- day changes are computed on announcement and non-announcement days, and are then used to infer the instanantaneous impulse responses. 22 Table 4: Coe¢ cients in regressions of yield changes and returns on intradaily monetary policy surprises Slope Coe¢ cient Standard Error R-squared AAA Yields -0.073 0.011 44.6 BAA Yields -0.073 0.009 48.2 Two-year Treasuries -0.062 0.006 77.3 Ten-year Treasuries -0.123 0.016 71.6 Five-year Breakevens 0.013 0.006 9.1 Five-to-ten year forward breakevens -0.028 0.010 18.8 Ten-year Canadian Yields -0.056 0.006 49.8 Ten-Year UK Yields -0.043 0.016 35.9 Ten-Year German Yields -0.036 0.008 30.1 Fannie Mae MBS Yield -0.071 0.022 32.0 SMB returns -0.050 0.099 0.7 HML returns 0.434 0.205 15.7 S&P returns 0.549 0.190 21.9 Notes: This table reports the reports the results of daily yield changes or returns (intradaily for the case of the S&P futures returns) onto the monetary policy surprise, measured from high-frequency changes in Treasury futures, as described in the text. The regression is run over the 28 announcement days listed in Table 1. The standard errors are heteroskedasticity-robust. One, two and three asterisks denote signi…cance at the 10, 5 and 1 percent levels, respectively. 23 Table 5: Monetary Policy Surprises at the Zero Bound Date Policy Surprise 11/25/2008 0.85 12/1/2008 0.96 12/16/2008 2.54 1/28/2009 -0.26 3/18/2009 3.89 4/29/2009 -0.60 6/24/2009 -1.07 8/12/2009 0.18 9/23/2009 0.98 11/4/2009 0.14 12/16/2009 -0.27 1/27/2010 -0.60 3/16/2010 0.43 4/28/2010 0.06 6/23/2010 0.24 8/10/2010 0.66 8/27/2010 -0.95 9/21/2010 0.70 10/15/2010 -0.24 11/3/2010 -0.05 12/14/2010 -0.39 1/26/2011 0.05 3/15/2011 -0.48 4/27/2011 0.24 6/2/2011 -0.35 8/9/2011 1.07 8/26/2011 -0.12 9/21/2011 0.17 Notes: This table shows the monetary policy surprises, estimated as the …rst prin- cipal component of intradaily changes in yields on Treasury futures contracts on all announcement days, as described in section 4. The surprises are normalized to have a unit standard deviation and signed so that a positive number represents falling yields. 24 Figure 1: Estimated Impulse Responses in Baseline VAR 10 Year Treasury 2 Year Treasury 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 5 Year Breakeven 5-10 Year Breakeven 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 BAA Yields AAA Yields 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 Note: Estimates of the impulse responses from monetary policy shocks onto the 6 variables in the system, from 0 to 250 days. 90 percent bootstrap confidence intervals are also shown, constructed as described in the text. The monetary policy shock is normalized to lower ten-year yields by 25 basis points. 25 Figure 2: Estimated Impulse Responses Using only 13 Announcement Days 10 Year Treasury 2 Year Treasury 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 5 Year Breakeven 5-10 Year Breakeven 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 BAA Yields AAA Yields 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 Note: As for Figure 1, except that only the 13 days highlighted in bold in Table 1 are treated as announcement days. 26 Figure 3: Estimated Impulse Responses Using Longer Sample to Estimate VAR 10 Year Treasury 2 Year Treasury 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 5 Year Breakeven 5-10 Year Breakeven 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 BAA Yields AAA Yields 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 Note: As for Figure 1, except that the reduced form VAR was estimated over the period since Janaury 1999, as described in the text. 27 Figure 4: Estimated Impulse Responses Using Alternative VAR with MBS Rates 10 Year Treasury 2 Year Treasury 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 5 Year Breakeven 5-10 Year Breakeven 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 MBS 0.2 0.1 0 -0.1 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 Note: As for Figure 1, except that the reduced form VAR included Fannie Mae current coupon MBS yields instead of corporate bond rates. 28 Figure 5: Estimated Impulse Responses Using Minnesota Prior 10 Year Treasury 2 Year Treasury 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 5 Year Breakeven 5-10 Year Breakeven 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 BAA Yields AAA Yields 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 Note: As for Figure 1, except that the reduced form VAR is estimated as the posterior mean corresponding to the Minnesota prior of Doan, Litterman and Sims (1984) with a shrinkage parameter of 1. 29 Figure 6: Estimated Impulse Responses in Baseline VAR using Event-Study Identification 10 Year Treasury 2 Year Treasury 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 5 Year Breakeven 5-10 Year Breakeven 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 BAA Yields AAA Yields 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 Note: Estimates of the impulse responses from regressing monetary policy shocks onto the 6 variables in the system, from 0 to 250 days. The monetary policy shocks were identified as the first principal component of changes in bond futures quotes in intraday windows around the events listed in Table 1. The reduced form VAR errors were then regressed onto these monetary policy shocks and the impulse responses were computed as described in the text. 90 percent bootstrap confidence intervals are also shown. 30 Figure 7: Estimated Impulse Responses Using only 13 Announcement Days and Event-Study Identification 10 Year Treasury 2 Year Treasury 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 5 Year Breakeven 5-10 Year Breakeven 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 BAA Yields AAA Yields 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 Note: As for Figure 6, except that only the 13 days highlighted in bold in Table 1 are treated as announcement days. 31 Figure 8: Estimated Impulse Responses Using Longer Sample to Estimate VAR and Event- Study Identification 10 Year Treasury 2 Year Treasury 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 5 Year Breakeven 5-10 Year Breakeven 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 BAA Yields AAA Yields 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 Note: As for Figure 6, except that the reduced form VAR was estimated over the period since Janaury 1999, as described in the text. 32 Figure 9: Estimated Impulse Responses Using Event-Study Identification in Alternative VAR with MBS Rates 10 Year Treasury 2 Year Treasury 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 5 Year Breakeven 5-10 Year Breakeven 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 MBS 0.2 0.1 0 -0.1 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 Note: As for Figure 6, except that the reduced form VAR included Fannie Mae current coupon MBS yields instead of corporate bond rates. 33 Figure 10: Estimated Impulse Responses Using Minnesota Prior 10 Year Treasury 2 Year Treasury 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 5 Year Breakeven 5-10 Year Breakeven 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 BAA Yields AAA Yields 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0 0 -0.1 -0.1 -0.2 -0.2 0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250 Note: As for Figure 6, except that the reduced form VAR is estimated as the posterior mean corresponding to the Minnesota prior of Doan, Litterman and Sims (1984) with a shrinkage parameter of 1. 34 References [1] Amihud, Yakov (2002): Illiquidity and Stock Returns: Cross-Section and Time- Series E¤ects, Journal of Financial Markets, 5, pp.31-56. [2] Bernanke, Ben S. (1986): Alternative explanations of the money-income corre- lation, Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, 25, pp.49-99. [3] Bernanke Ben S. and Kenneth N. Kuttner (2005): What Explains the Stock s Market' Reaction to Federal Reserve Policy?, Journal of Finance, 60, pp.1221- 1257. [4] Christiano, Lawrence J., Martin Eichenbaum and Charles L. Evans (1996): The E¤ects of Monetary Policy Shocks: Evidence from the Flow of Funds, Review of Economics and Statistics, 78, pp.16-34. [5] D'Amico, Stefania and Thomas B. King (2010): Flow and Stock E¤ects of Large- Scale Treasury Purchases, Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2010-52. [6] Doan, Thomas, Robert B. Litterman and Christopher A. Sims (1984): Forecast- ing and Conditional Projection Using Realistic Prior Distributions, Econometric Reviews, 3, 1-100. [7] Doh, Taeyoung (2010): The E¢ cacy of Large-Scale Asset Purchases at the Zero Lower Bound, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Economic Review. [8] Faust, Jon, Eric T. Swanson and Jonathan H. Wright (2011): Identifying VARs Based on High Frequency Futures Data , Journal of Monetary Economics, 51, pp.1107-1131. [9] Gagnon, Joseph , Matthew Raskin, Julie Remache and Brian Sack (2010): Large- Scale Asset Purchases by the Federal Reserve: Did They Work?, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Sta¤ Report 441. [10] Gürkaynak, Refet S., Brian Sack and Eric T. Swanson (2005): Do Actions Speak Louder Than Words? The Response of Asset Prices to Monetary Policy Actions and Statements, International Journal of Central Banking, 1, pp.55-93. [11] Gürkaynak, Refet S., Brian Sack and Jonathan H. Wright (2007): The U.S. Treasury Yield Curve: 1961 to the Present, Journal of Monetary Economics, 54, pp.2291-2304. [12] Gürkaynak, Refet S., Brian Sack and Jonathan H. Wright (2010): The TIPS yield curve and In‡ation Compensation, American Economics Journal, 2, pp.70-92. [13] Hamilton, James D. and Jing Wu (2010): The E¤ectiveness of Alternative Mone- tary Policy Tools in a Zero Lower Bound Environment, working paper, University of California, San Diego. 34 s [14] Hancock, Diane and Wayne Passmore (2011): Did the Federal Reserve' MBS Purchase Program Lower Mortgage Rates?, Finance and Economics Discussion Series, 2011-01. [15] Kohn, Don (2009): Monetary Policy in the Financial Crisis, speech. [16] Krishnamurthy, Arvind and Annette Vissing-Jorgenson (2011): The E¤ects of Quantitative Easing on Long-term Interest Rates, working paper, Northwestern University. [17] Kilian, Lutz (1998): Small-Sample Con…dence Intervals for Impulse Response Functions, Review of Economics and Statistics, 80, pp.218-230. [18] Kuttner, Kenneth N. (2001): Monetary Policy Surprises and Interest Rates: Evi- dence from the Fed Funds Futures Market, Journal of Monetary Economics, 47, pp.523-544. [19] Modigliani, Franco and Richard Sutch (1966): Innovations in Interest Rate Pol- icy, American Economic Review, 52, pp.178-97. [20] Modigliani, Franco and Richard Sutch (1967): Debt Management and the Term Structure of Interest Rates: An Empirical Analysis of Recent Experience, Journal of Political Economy, 75, pp.569-89. [21] Neely, Christopher (2010): The Large-Scale Asset Purchases Had Large Interna- tional E¤ects, working paper, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [22] Politis, Dimitris N. and Joseph P. Romano (1994): The Stationary Bootstrap, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 89, pp.1303-1313. [23] Rigobon, Roberto (2003): Identi…cation Through Heteroskedasticity, Review of Economics and Statistics, 85, pp.777-92. [24] Rigobon, Roberto and Brian Sack (2003): Measuring the Response of Monetary Policy to the Stock Market, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118, pp.639-669. [25] Rigobon, Roberto and Brian Sack (2004): The Impact of Monetary Policy on Asset Prices, Journal of Monetary Economics, 51, pp.1553-1575. [26] Rigobon, Roberto and Brian Sack (2005). The E¤ects of War risk on US Financial Markets, Journal of Banking and Finance, 29, pp.1769-1789. [27] Sims, Christopher A. (1980): Macroeconomics and reality, Econometrica, 48, pp. 1–48. s [28] Swanson, Eric T. (2011): Let' Twist Again: A High-Frequency Event-Study Analysis of Operation Twist and Its Implications for QE2, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1, pp.151-188. 35 [29] Vayanos, Dimitri and Jean-Luc Vila (2009): A Preferred-Habitat Model of the Term-Structure of Interest Rates, working paper, London School of Economics. 36
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This expression is often used ironically in green text stories containing cringe-worthy interactions with socially awkward men.
Hashtags about One Direction trending on Twitter is no news, but it is today, as millions of diehard fans react to the news of Zayn Malik's departure from the world's most popular boy band.
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Froggy Fresh, the rapper formerly known as Krispy Kreme, demonstrates his impressive ability to mimic the famous Hong Kong American martial artist Bruce Lee.

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Loader, gravel bids highlight Davison county panel's agenda
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Arkansas Black apples
I just bought some Arkansas Black apples up in NE Georgia. Are they supposed to be so hard that it makes my jaws tired eating them? They have a great taste, but my family won't eat them out of hand. Suggestions as to their best use?
would they eat them if you got one of those gadgets that cores and slices into wedges. With her braces, my granddaughter uses that on all her apples.
I also suspect they'll soften up with a big of time.
Wish I had some ... the really hard ones are getting softer every day ...
Our native AR Blacks are one of the crispiest varieties, a long-storage variety, so yes harder than what you may be used to. ;) They can be used for baking, either whole or in pies and cobblers, and make really good cider or apple butter. Make good dried apple slices too.
Yes, they are hard apples. They will improve with storage, if you have a cold place to store them.
They are the type of cooking apple that holds it's shape, so it is for pies and strudel, not apple sauce.
I suspect that your family would eat them sliced.


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text:
Paul V. Braun
Paul Braun is a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in 1998, and following a postdoctoral appointment at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, he joined the faculty at Illinois in 1999. His group focuses on the synthesis and properties of 3D architectured materials that exhibit unique optical, electrochemical, thermal, and mechanical properties.
Hailong Ning, Paul V. Braun Published September 26, 2011
Modified photonic structures from the wings of weevil beetles set a new record for optical emission control.


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We chose Square because it allowed us to get up and running as quickly as possible.Matt Wright, Wright Bros. Brew & Brew
Square for Coffee Shops
Now serving: more orders with your cafe point of sale.Get started
One app, many solutions.
Square Register is the free app behind every swipe. Take payments, create custom menus, send digital receipts, manage orders, and more.
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- Customize taxes, tipping, and discounts.
Pay 2.75% per swipe, get paid fast
Accept Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express at just 2.75% per swipe. Square deposits payment from the sale into your bank account in one to two business days.Learn about Square Pricing
Your counter's counterpart. Just $99.
Complete your cafe point of sale and take payments securely with Square Stand. All you need to add is an iPad and the free Square Register app to get started.Learn more about Square Stand
Instant setup
From kitchen ticket and receipt printers to cash drawers and bar code scanners, it's easy to connect the hardware you need to your cafe point of sale. Plug accessories into the USB hub that comes with Square Stand, or connect compatible hardware to your iPad.
Make every order more personal.
Whether it's soy milk or a particular espresso blend, all customers order differently. Add modifiers to your menu, upload and manage multiple items, and change details like price, name, and quantity—right from your Square account.
Know when you're low
Keep track of inventory counts free with Square. You can also connect your account to Stitch Labs to track stock quantities across Square and your other sales channels.
Here's a tip: more tips.
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Sell your beans wholesale.
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Easy-to-understand reports in real time
Check total sales from week to week, compare regular versus new customers, and review how much the average customer spends.Learn more about Square Analytics
Syncs with your other solutions.
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Intuit QuickBooks
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Connect Square and SumAll to see how your social marketing affects your sales. Get more out of your social network.
Fresh KDS
Fresh KDS is a kitchen display system that works on any Android device. Sign in with your Square account to start tracking orders.
Let us help you grow your business.
Our sales team can help simplify your operations and get set up with the right solution to meet your business needs.Contact Sales


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Here Are Some Morning Links!
- Ed Schultz interviewed the 47% videographer the other night. Did you watch? Wanna see, if you didn't? Why not, it's Friday! -Mediaite
- Do you know that Danny Boyle won't direct James Bond movies, as if anyone is asking, and also almost directed Alien 4? You don't know those things? Well then why don't you READ ABOUT THEM! -/Film
- This is the absolute last thing I want to watch right now and I refuse to do it, but in case you want to see: here is a mashup of people vomiting in movies! -FilmDrunk
- Aww, poor Matt Lauer. Nobody likes him! Poor little jerk, all he did was be a jerk on TV and off TV and now nobody likes him, what a cruel world. -Dlisted
- The Week, on how Hollywood refrains from hiring female directors for super hero movies. Uh-doy, girls don't know ANYTHING about comics. #boysrule #jk #hollywoodblows -TheWeek


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View asian Singles in Stairtown
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Paul J. McNulty '80 is Grove City College's ninth
President. His new calling follows a long and distinguished career as an
attorney in public service and private practice, and valuable
experience in higher education.President McNulty is a former
U.S. Deputy Attorney General and partner in the global law firm Baker
& McKenzie. He oversaw the prosecution of terrorists in the
aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, set policy for prosecuting corporate
fraud and is considered a leading expert on business ethics, corporate
governance and internal investigations.McNulty is the fourth
alumnus to serve as President of the College, where he studied history
and met his wife, Brenda (Millican '80).At Baker & McKenzie,
McNulty led the firm's global corporate compliance and investigations
practice. He has been recognized by the National Law Journal as one of the top 50 "Trailblazers and Pioneers in Corporate Governance and Compliance," selected as the sole recipient of Ethisphere
magazine's "Hall of Fame" designation in its 2014 "Attorneys Who
Matter" rankings, and listed as one of "2014's Most Influential People
in Business Ethics."He is widely known for his leadership at the
U.S. Department of Justice, where he served as the Deputy Attorney
General, the second highest-ranking official in the Justice Department
and the chief operating officer leading more than 100,000 employees. He
chaired President George W. Bush's Corporate Fraud Task Force,
successfully argued a police conduct case before the U.S. Supreme Court,
organized the U.S. rule of law efforts in Iraq, and authored the
so-called "McNulty Memo," which served as a milestone statement on the
federal prosecution of business organizations.McNulty was
confirmed by the Senate as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of
Virginia three days after the Sept. 11 attacks and, as the chief law
enforcement authority in one of the country's most important federal
districts, was subsequently entrusted with many high-profile terrorist
prosecutions. He held other positions at the Department of Justice and
received the Edmund J. Randolph Award, the Department's highest honor.McNulty's
career includes 11 years as a senior lawyer on Capitol Hill where he
served as Counsel for the House Ethics Committee, the Chief Counsel and
Director of Legislative Operations for the Majority Leader of the House
of Representatives, and Chief Counsel for the House Judiciary
Committee's Subcommittee on Crime.McNulty served on the Grove
City College Board of Trustees from 2004 to 2014, chairing the
Enrollment and Student Affairs Committee for six years. Following his
Commencement Address in 2007, he received an honorary doctorate from his
alma mater and the Jack Kennedy Memorial Alumni Achievement Award in
1998. He also served the College as an adjunct instructor in the
Political Science Department from 1994 to 2001. He was awarded an
honorary LLD in 2003 from Capital University School of Law where he
received his juris doctorate in 1983. He also served as a Presbyterian
elder for 28 years and as a youth basketball coach. He sits on the Board
of Directors of the Ethics Resource Center.The McNultys have
three daughters and two sons-in-law, Katy McNulty '07 and Jonathan
Hittinger, Anni and Hub Blankenship, and Corrie McNulty '14. Their son,
Joseph, died of cancer in 2012 at the age of 26 while attending law
school. The McNultys' first grandchild, Henry Tilghman Hittinger, was born over Inauguration Weekend.
Harbison Chapel is the center of the religious life of the campus. It provides an inspiring place of worship and a place for quiet meditation.
A listing of local accommodations near campus.
Grove City College believes in purposeful accounting of its finances. Most of the College's operating expenses are covered by student tuition.
There's no better way to get to know Grove City College than to visit us and experience the campus.
Grove City College teaches, advocates and operates under the principles of free market economic theory. By putting that theory into practice, the College maintains competitively low costs and a superior academic program.


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Women in the Military
Essays cover a variety of viewpoints on the subject of women in the military, including whether mothers belong in the military, should military colleges expel pregnant students, and do women reduce the effectiveness of ground combat units.
From the critics
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Chicago police may scrap entrance exam
Fraternal Order of Police President Mark Donahue said the idea "sounds too stupid to be true"
Editor's Note:
Editor's note: Those who support the removal of an entrance exam claim there are good reasons to make that move, like saving money, increasing minority hiring in law enforcement and avoiding litigation. Others think the idea is illogical, dangerous and, as the FOP president put it, "too stupid to be true." What do you think? Smart move or the start of a dangerous precedent? Here's your chance to be heard — add your comments below.
By Fran Spielman and Frank Main
Chicago Sun-Times
CHICAGO — The Chicago Police Department is seriously considering scrapping the police entrance exam to bolster minority hiring, save millions on test preparation and avert costly legal battles that have dogged the exam process for decades, City Hall sources said Tuesday.
If the process is opened to everyone who applies and meets education and residency requirements, Chicago would be virtually alone among major cities. Most cities have police entrance exams -- and for good reason, experts say.
Copyright © 2013 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Full story: Chicago police may scrap entrance exam
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The American West
People Places and Ideas
Reviewed by
Deborah Donovan
This lavishly illustrated and informative volume serves as the catalog for the recently renamed Rockwell Museum of Western Art of Corning, New York, formerly the Rockwell Museum. The museum's collection had been focused on the art of the American West since its founding in 1976; after the additional bequest in 1983 from a benefactor with "a passion for the West," it rightly began to be called "the best of the West in the East."
The catalog's primary author, Campbell, an art historian and curator based in New Mexico, tackles the core questions of "What is the American West?" and "What is western art?" in her exhaustively researched essay. She traces artistic activity in the West to the years immediately following the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1803, when artists, drawn to the newly opened area west of the Mississippi, began documenting the distinctive landscape for those who could not make the trip. She organizes the museum's holdings according to themes indigenous to the West, including wilderness, the buffalo, horses, American Indians, cowboys, and the lure of the emerging Southwest. These themes are emphasized by the juxtaposition of works with similar subject matter, from different time periods and in different media, such as the eye-catching horse sculptures created a century apart, one almost life-like, the other an impressionistic shell of the animal.
Prime examples of Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, and Henry Farny, each of whom helped to document both the beauty and the harsh realities of the lands they encountered, are complemented by contemporary works by Native American artists Norm Akers and Mario Martinez, visibly demonstrating the breadth of this collection. In the chapter devoted to American Indians, Campbell offers an abbreviated history of nineteenth-century expeditions and travelers' encounters with Native Americans. The text is interspersed with visual portrayals varying from George Catlin's 1871 depiction of a band of Mandan Indians to Andy Warhol's 1986 portrait of a grim Geronimo.
Unlike the dry text accompanying many museum catalogs, Campbell's essay is sprinkled with quotes both contemporary and historical from artists, historians, and poets. These help to elucidate the author's goal of discovering, through this vast and varied collection, what really constitutes the American West. A bibliography is included, as well as short biographies of 165 artists featured in the collection, making this catalog not only a visual banquet, but a valuable research tool as well.


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I haven't been sharing much lately, as I've been busy cooking up a new life for myself. I'll reveal all in a bit, when everything's settled, but for now, here's my garden on the first day of spring. It's way too early for all this, but I have to admit that I'm really enjoying it. And Toby loves to be in the garden with me, hiding in the feathery grasses and pouncing out joyously at every opportunity. If there's still snow where you are, here, have a few spring flowers.
Spring Has SprungPosted March 20, 2015 by Abra Bennett
Categories: French Letters Visits America
Tags: Cats, Pacific Northwest garden
AwakeningPosted February 27, 2015 by Abra Bennett
Categories: French Letters Visits America
Tags: Bereavement, Grief, Widowhood
For six months after Shel died I sat still. Frozen, paralyzed with grief, surrendering to my loss. I didn't do much, didn't see many people, didn't make much of an effort, just let the pain take me away. I suppose that I shopped and cooked and did laundry, but it's all pretty much a blur now. If you spent time with me then, wrote to me, did something kind for me, I thank you sincerely. I'm afraid that I don't remember much of the detail, except who was there, and who wasn't.
Then I went to Europe for three months, and I started to come alive again. The struggle of travelling alone, being in London and Villefranche sur Mer all alone when I'd never been there before, being in Uzès where I'd lived for so long, but never on my own, it was all hard enough that I had to come back to life or else lose myself completely. Lose myself in the words swirling around me, in the masses of strangers, in the different ways friends saw me, now that I'm alone. Really, the whole three months was a sweet slap in the face. And if you were part of that cosmic slap, je te remercie vivement. Thank you.
Coming home was easier that I'd expected. This orchid that Hilary and Nelson sent me when Shel died has decided to bloom again to welcome me back, even though I haven't been here to tend it. In this house I have a clothes dryer, a garbage disposal, only 15 carpeted stairs, as opposed to the 50 stone and tile steps that I had in France. Here I have my own bed, where Shel and I slept together for so many years, and my own car, as opposed to the tiny Panda I had in France, a doll-sized car if ever there was one. Here I have a closet full of clothes, as opposed to living out of one suitcase, as I have for the past three months. Here I have comfort, and convenience.
There was a time when all the comfort, all the convenience in the world couldn't compare with the charms of life in France. But that was in another lifetime. Alone, recovering from a great loss, comfort is what I seek, and I'm trying not to be ashamed about it. I pride myself on being tough, but the recliner, the one Shel always called "the comfy chair," beckons to me so seductively; it embraces me when no one else does, and I give myself over to that.
Spring is not far off here, the time of awakening. Winter is passing, the darkness and cold will soon be memories. Just as we don't seek to hold onto the winter, I'm letting go of the pain, letting spring into my heart. Not letting go of Shel, because of course he'll be forever with me. But I'm letting go of the piercing, paralyzing grief, and in doing so I'm awakening to the new season, to my new life, wherever I may find it.
I Get AroundPosted February 19, 2015 by Abra Bennett
Categories: At Home In France
Tags: European trains, Solo travel, Widowhood
I'm sitting in my hotel room looking out over the runway at Charles de Gaulle airport, because I'm leaving Europe tomorrow, after just a bit more than three months here. Most of it I've spent getting my head straight, but just recently I've spent a lot of it traveling. I have a lot to show you about the lovely Netherlands, but that will have to wait for a couple of days. Right now, my brain is humming and clickety-clacking from a day spent training through three countries.
I left this morning from Ommen, via a small commuter train, in the sweet company of Katherine. I had been sure that she didn't need to come with me, but thank goodness she did, because really, I have about 7-8 words of Dutch, none of which were very useful in train stations. So from Ommen we went to Zwolle, where we changed trains and went to Schiphol airport. Not because I was flying anywhere from there, mind you, but just to change trains and take the Thalys train to Brussels. Katherine and I had a surprisingly good lunch at Schiphol, and then, with a flurry of kisses and waves, we said au revoir.
In case you ever happen to find yourself on the Thalys, let me tell you that in First Class they serve you beautiful complimentary meals, at your seat, with wine. They look delicious, but there's never a low-carb option, so all I do is look, and accept a bottle of wine, which, in itself, makes the trip just that much more enjoyable.
I arrived in Brussels to find that there was a lot of confusion about my train to CDG – they changed the departure track, the announcements were misleading, everyone was asking each other what was going on, and so on. Once on board, the restaurant workers were on strike, so no food or drink was available. I was fine, but I did hear some grumbling around me.
Seven hours after leaving Ommen I arrived at CDG. You know, I could have flown it in about an hour, but it just didn't occur to me. Shel and I always took the train whenever possible, and I guess I'm continuing that tradition. We always stayed at the Sheraton inside the airport, and so here I am, overlooking the runway as we did so many times together. And we always had dinner at Brasserie Flo, in Terminal 2F. However, by some quirk of mis-memory, I headed to Terminal 2 E, which is about as far as you can get from 2F without taking a train. After a cheery couple of kilometers of trans-terminal strolling (mercifully sans luggage) I sat down to dinner, where I absolutely unconsciously, but unerringly, ordered exactly what Shel ate the last time we dined there together, just a year and a half ago. He had said that it was very good, and so it was.
I came to Europe in mid-November, to close out my life spent here with Shel, and to face up to being alone. I've done that, in spades, right up to my final dinner in France, at least for the foreseeable future. I feel so much better than I did when I arrived, almost normal in fact. It's been tough, lonely, interesting, loving, scary, reassuring, and satisfying by turns. But one thing is clear now – nine and a half months after Shel died I still miss him like crazy, but the acute grief is finished. I'm my own person again, feeling like myself, feeling better every day, and looking forward to whatever comes next. I'm hoping to spend an uneventful day up in the sky tomorrow, and to being re-united with my little family, my house, my garden, and my cat. And to not taking the train again for at least a season or two.
On My WayPosted February 14, 2015 by Abra Bennett
Categories: At Home In France
Tags: Bereavement, Grief, Widowhood
Tonight, one last dinner in this dining room. The orchid was blooming when I arrived two months ago, and it still is, outlasting me. I can't say that I was blooming when I arrived, nor am I blooming now, but I'm definitely doing better. Being here, among so many friends, learning to live here amidst the echoes and shadows of my life with Shel, only without him, learning to be alone here, has been good for me. Good in the way that medicine is good for you, only sweeter.
Here you see just eight of the fifty steps inside this house, and tomorrow morning I'll walk down them for the last time. Believe me when I tell you that I won't be missing them at all. I'm off to the Netherlands in the morning, and I'm excited about that. And in a few more days, I'll leave Europe again, and head back to the New World. I really don't know where I belong, anymore, but I'm going to be finding that out. I'm letting life take me where it will, and I'm happy to be along for the ride.
Sweet Resto, Sweet TownPosted February 9, 2015 by Abra Bennett
Categories: At Home In France
Tags: French restaurants
If you visit this region, you're going to visit the Pont du Gard. No ifs, ands, or buts, because it's totally amazing and you have to see it to believe it. And virtually across the road is the lovely, albeit rather deserted, town of Castillon du Gard. In this town there are several restaurants whose prices will make you faint, but there's also
Les Jarres, which Maryse and I happened into almost by accident, and where we promptly fell in love. With the restaurant, that is. If you go, get the plat du jour, which will be something prepared à la plancha. In our case, it was tender strips of pork, served on a wooden board with salad, an earthy purée of mushrooms, a ramekin of creamed leeks, and potatoes for her, sautéed fennel for me. It was copious, and every bite was delicious. All this for 16 Euros, which won't even get you an appetizer at the famous restaurant practically next door. The house wine, however, was pretty bad, and I advise you to get a real bottle of something better; they'll cork it later so that you can take anything that remains with you.
After lunch you can stroll through a town where the graffitti might be written in Provençale, or maybe it's in Occitan, we didn't know. And if you do, please speak up!
It's a charming little place that invites lingering,
either near the town's mascot,
or on this beautiful little bench. Just remember: plat du jour, a real bottle of wine. You'll love it there, I promise.
To Market, To MarketPosted February 2, 2015 by Abra Bennett
Categories: At Home In France
Tags: French food, Provençale market
Just a little photo essay for you today, and fairly random, at that. I walked out my front door and into the Saturday market, in all its crowded, bustling glory, and wherever I could get a clear shot of some of its offerings, I did. Here's just a part of what you can get at my local market, everything from discount boots to wine sold by a nun. Have a look.
And just think, I'm leaving this behind to do my shopping in a grocery store.
My Work Here Is DonePosted January 26, 2015 by Abra Bennett
Categories: At Home In France
Tags: Bereavement, Grief, Widowhood
Six months after Shel died I decided to give myself the gift of three months in France, to see whether I might be able to drop back into the life he and I shared here. Now, three weeks before that three months is up, I realize that I've found the answer.
I've worked hard to perfect my French, although I'm still a long way from where I'd like to be. I've gathered our friends together to commemorate Shel's life, buried his ashes in one of his favorite spots. I've spent time with our dear friends, and have more of that planned. I've walked the streets we used to walk together, here in our little town, and I've discovered some that we never found. I've shopped where we used to shop, parked where we used to park, had coffee where we used to sit in the sun together. I've seen things that have changed in the year since we were last here together, I've been showered with heartfelt condolences and countless kisses, and I've felt the ghosts of our enormous past happiness all around me.
Past happiness, that's what I feel here. Past. I could retreat into that past, but that doesn't sound like much of a future. And what I don't feel is that my future lies here, although I can't yet articulate why. I'll always be fiercely attached to this place, this language and culture, and especially these friends, some of whom I love beyond reason. I wish I could drag them into the future with me, even though I don't know where my future is, or what it may hold. Je cherche mon chemin dans la vie I've said countless times, when people asked whether I were going to stay. I'm looking for my path in life. And that's still true. I just think that I won't find it here.
That's what I came to find out, and I feel fortunate to have found an answer. I do believe in never saying never, so maybe some circuitous route will bring me back. But for now I'm waiting to go home, to start looking all over again for that path to future happiness. Pourvu que ça existe. Here's hoping it's out there somewhere.


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RAHWAY — The line-up for the Rahway Mayor's Summer Concert Series has been announced. Concerts will be on Thursday nights, starting on Aug. 5, at 7 p.m. on Main Street behind the Union County Performing Arts Center.
New Credit Card Rules and What They Mean to You
by staff report • • 0 Comments
Did you know that there are new rules governing the fees and penalties that credit card companies can charge you?
"Predators" Preys on its Viewers
by staff report • • 0 Comments
[predators-movie-poster] By Michael S. Goldberger, film critic
There is something awful yet probably necessary about a female praying mantis eating its mate. Just as horrible but bereft of any biological or social rationale is director Nimród Antal's "Predators."
Expand Your Barbecue Repertoire
by staff report • • 0 Comments
NEW YORK, N.Y. – Tired of serving the same old burger, dog and sides? Inject fresh life into your barbecue repertoire. While most agree a perfectly char-grilled burger is barbecue nirvana, it's good to shake things up by adding novel ideas to the menu rotation. We expect it from favorite restaurants, so why not at home?
Community Calendar
by staff report • • 0 Comments
Singles • July 17 at 8:30 p.m. – Steppin' Out Singles will hold an upscale singles dance at the Woodbridge Hilton Grand Ballroom, 20 Wood Ave. South, Iselin. Ages 40+, no jeans/sneakers. Admission: $15. For info, call 1-732-656-1801.
Prosecutor Wants To Try Old Bridge Murder Suspects As Adults
by staff report • • 0 Comments
NEW BRUNSWICK — Middlesex County Prosecutor Bruce J. Kaplan announced today that his office will file a motion with a Family Court judge seeking a waiver to try five teens charged with the murder of Dr. Divyendu Sinha as adults.
Jobless Claims Rise In New Jersey
by staff report • • 0 Comments
STATE – New Jersey initial unemployment claims increased by 6,167 for the week ending July 3, according to data released by the federal Department of Labor today.
Massive AIDS Program Cuts Leave Some 'Helpless And Hopeless'
by staff report • • 0 Comments
FROM CLIFFVIEW PILOT: The letters began hitting mailboxes late last week. For 967 recipients in New Jersey, the contents hurt: Facing its smallest budget in five years, the state changed eligibility requirements for those covered by its AIDS Drug Distribution Program, which pays for thousands of dollars in medications for low-to-middle-income, underinsured people who are HIV-positive.
Assemblyman Sentencing Postponed
by staff report • • 0 Comments
TRENTON –The sentencing of former Assemblyman Neil Cohen was adjourned at the defendant's request and rescheduled for Aug. 13 at 9 a.m. before Superior Court Judge Gerald Council in Trenton.
Vigil Planned For Murdered Old Bridge Man
by staff report • • 0 Comments
OLD BRIDGE – Dr. Divyendu Sinha will be remembered at a vigil on Sunday, July 18, at Old Bridge High School. The memorial service will be held from 11 a.m. – 2 p.m.


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Tomatoes & Strawberries
I have never grown anything, ever. I have always been interested in hydroponics and have read a lot but never had a chance to do anything with it. My wife wants to grow strawberries and tomatoes this year, and she wants lots of them to make sauce and can. Can these grow together in one system? I like the systems made of corrugated pipe that zig zag back and forth down an A frame, looks simple enough to build without breaking the bank if it fails miserably. VipVenom had posted a sweet looking system that I thought I would copy unless someone warns me off. PVC if not the corrugated. I am in upstate NY and plan to grow exclusively outdoors.
I like to dive in head first, but tell me if this is just idiotic.
You can grow anything in a hydroponic system if you have the right setup. I'm also from NY on the southwestern end.
That system will probably work for what you want to do. you just need to be careful to not let the tomatoes shade out the strawberries and watch the tomato plants closely. they can develop giant root systems which could clog the pipe of smother out the strawberries.


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