THE BROOKINGS PANEL ON ECONOMIC ACTIVITY held its eighty-eighth conference in Washington, D.C., on September 10 and 11, 2009. All of the papers were related in some way to the remarkable macroeconomic developments of the past two years: the papers considered the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates, consumer financial regulation, unconventional monetary policy, the macroeconomic consequences of fiscal stimulus, and monetary and fiscal policy in the Great Depression. This issue of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity presents the papers from the conference, comments by the formal discussants, and summaries of the discussions of the papers by conference participants.
