We encourage you to submit comments, queries and suggestions on our blog entries. We will post them below the entry, subject to the following guidelines:
Please be brief: Comments are limited to 1500 characters.
Please be quick: Comments submitted more than 1 week after the blog entry appears will not be posted.
Please be on-topic and patient: Comments are moderated and will not appear until they have been reviewed to ensure that they are substantive and clearly related to the topic of the post. The moderator will not post comments that are
abusive, harassing, or threatening;
obscene or vulgar; or
commercial in nature;
as well as comments that constitute a personal attack. We reserve the right not to post a comment; no notice will be given regarding whether a submission will or will not be posted.
A paper by Delia Cabe, “Buying into the Future,” which appeared in the fall 2001 Radcliffe Quarterly, tells in an arresting way the story of how Americans became such big spenders. The article displays, at the bottom of each page, a timeline of first appearances of products in the American marketplace. Many iconic products originated much earlier than we might guess: Crayola Crayons (1903), Slinky (1945), Frisbee (1948), and so on.
Over the next few years, large volumes of homes are likely to flow from foreclosure onto lenders’ balance sheets as “real estate owned,” or REO. Without a significant boost to demand, this large volume of “distressed” real estate could potentially put substantial downward pressure on home prices. Accordingly, new policy initiatives are needed to increase the rate at which properties that flow into REO get reabsorbed back into use as renter- or owner-occupied units. In this post, I make the case for a “Homes for Heroes” tax credit.
Everything seems to be anthropomorphized at one time or another—especially in advertising, where one needs to get a point across simply and memorably. So it’s not surprising that the idea has been used in financial education for children.
February’s Empire State Manufacturing Survey (ESMS) indicates that manufacturing activity in New York State continued to expand for a third consecutive month. The survey’s headline index rose an encouraging six points to 19.5, its highest level in more than a year. Other indicators in the report show steady growth in orders, shipments, and employment, and fairly widespread planned increases in capital spending. In this post, we take a closer look at the recent results of the survey, which indicate that growth in New York’s manufacturing sector has rebounded in recent months from its decline during the summer and fall of 2011.
Credit rating agencies have been widely criticized in recent years for the poor performance of their ratings on mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and other structured-finance bonds. In response to the concerns of investors and other market participants, the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act incorporates a range of reforms likely to significantly reshape the rating industry. In this post, we discuss these reforms and their implications for investors, regulators, and the rating agencies themselves.
Policymakers are increasingly viewing colleges and universities as important engines of growth for their local areas. In addition to having direct economic impacts, these institutions help to raise the skills of an area’s workforce (its local “human capital”), and they do this in two ways. First, by educating potential workers, they increase the supply of human capital in a region. Perhaps less obviously, these schools can also raise a region’s demand for human capital by helping local businesses create jobs for skilled workers. In this post, we draw on our recent academic research and Current Issues article to outline these pathways and how they might inform local economic development policy. (We also discuss our findings in a new video.)
Payday lenders make small, short-term loans to millions of households across the country. Though popular with users, the credit is controversial in part because payday lenders are accused of targeting their seemingly high-priced credit at minority households. In this post, we look at whether black and Hispanic households are in fact more likely to use payday credit. We find that, unconditionally, they are, but once we control for financial characteristics—such as past delinquency, debt-to-income ratios, and credit availability, blacks and Hispanics are not significantly more likely than whites to use payday credit.
In this post, I focus on the broad historical progression of international banking activity. This broad progression serves as a backdrop for a range of other discussions and posts on global banking, on issues such as foreign banking organizations’ use of liquidity facilities in the United States and the role of banks in international risk-sharing and international transmission of shocks. It also helps explain the policy regimes in place through recent financial crises and even some of the data gaps that regulators and researchers have encountered.
More than three decades ago, Robert Stovall, a money manager, championed a theory put forth by a sports columnist. Stovall studied the performance of stock indexes after each Super Bowl and concluded that the winner could predict stock market trends. For fifteen consecutive years, between 1967 and 1983, the New York Stock Exchange showed annual gains when a team from the old National Football League won the Super Bowl and fell when a team from the old American Football League emerged as the victor.
Liberty Street Economics features insight and analysis from economists working at the intersection of research and Fed policymaking.
E-mail alert
RSS feed
Twitter