The Private Premium in Public Bonds?

Anna Kovner and Chenyang Wei

In a 2012 New York Fed study, Chenyang Wei and I find that interest rate spreads on publicly traded bonds issued by companies with privately traded equity are about 31 basis points higher on average than spreads on bonds issued by companies with publicly traded equity, even after controlling for risk and other factors. These differences are economically and statistically significant and they persist in the secondary market. We control for many factors associated with bond pricing, including risk, liquidity, and covenants. Although these controls account for some of the absolute pricing difference, the price wedge between public and private companies remains. Despite these pricing differences, private companies with public bonds are no more likely to go bankrupt or to be downgraded than are similar public companies. In this post, we briefly summarize the findings of our study.

The Great Moderation, Forecast Uncertainty, and the Great Recession

Ging Cee Ng* and Andrea Tambalotti

The Great Recession of 2007-09 was a dramatic macroeconomic event, marked by a severe contraction in economic activity and a significant fall in inflation. These developments surprised many economists, as documented in a recent post on this site. One factor cited for the failure to anticipate the magnitude of the Great Recession was a form of complacency affecting forecasters in the wake of the so-called Great Moderation. In this post, we attempt to quantify the role the Great Moderation played in making the Great Recession appear nearly impossible in the eyes of macroeconomists.

Just Released: The New York Fed Staff Forecast—May 2012

Jonathan McCarthy, Richard Peach, and Simon Potter

We are presenting the New York Fed staff outlook for the U.S. economy to the New York Fed’s Economic Advisory Panel (EAP) at their meeting here today. It is an opportunity we take occasionally to get critical feedback from leading economists in academia and the private sector on the staff forecast; such feedback helps us evaluate the assumptions and reasoning underlying the forecast and the risks to it. Subjecting the staff forecast to such evaluation is important because it is an input assisting New York Fed President William Dudley in his preparation for the monetary policy decisions made at Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings. In a similar spirit of inviting feedback, we are sharing a short summary of the staff forecast in this post; for more detail, see the material from the EAP meeting on our website.

A Boost in Your Paycheck: How Are U.S. Workers Using the Payroll Tax Cut?

Basit Zafar, Grant Graziani, and Wilbert van der Klaauw

Over the past several months, there was a flurry of debate in Washington over the extension of the payroll tax cut. Many supporters of the tax cut—worth about $1,000 to a family earning the median income of slightly more than $50,000 a year—have cited its importance to the nation’s economic recovery, while opponents claim that it will only add to the national deficit without boosting the economy. Exactly how such a tax cut affects the aggregate economy relies heavily on how U.S. workers use the extra funds in their paychecks. Unfortunately, we know little about how such tax cuts are used by workers. So we decided to ask them and, in this post, report the answers they gave us.

The Flash Crash, Two Years On

Adam Biesenbach* and Marco Cipriani

On May 6, 2010, several U.S.-based equity products underwent an extraordinary price decline and recovery, all within less than half an hour. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and other equity indices dropped by more than 5 percent in a matter of minutes, only to rebound as quickly. Individual equity securities experienced similar, if not larger, swings in prices, both up and down. This post describes what happened on that fateful day, and summarizes the findings of the academic literature on this topic.

Historical Echoes: Pneumatic Tubes and Banking

Amy Farber, New York Fed Research Library

Pneumatic tubes—a system in which cylinder-shaped containers (that could contain messages, money, small objects, and even food) are propelled through a network of tubes via compressed air or partial vacuum—are a relatively old technology. (Pneumatic tubes were patented in the United States in 1940, with earlier forms existing prior to this date). But when used in innovative ways in the past, they were viewed as futuristic. What may come to mind first is the use of pneumatic tubes in George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) to transport messages and newspapers. The 1954 film of the book depicts the use of the technology (starting three minutes into this clip).

Euro Area Spending Imbalances and the Sovereign Debt Crisis

Matthew Higgins and Thomas Klitgaard

Euro area periphery countries borrowed heavily from abroad in the run-up to the sovereign debt crisis. How were these funds used? In this post, we recap our recent Current Issues study, showing that pre-crisis borrowing by the periphery countries (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain) went mainly to finance private consumption or housing booms rather than productivity-enhancing investments. Most analysis of the crisis has focused on the need for fiscal adjustment in the periphery. A look at the drivers of the run-up in foreign borrowing, however, suggests that private spending in the periphery will also need to move to a lower plane. The fact that debts were built up without adding to these countries’ productive capacity is likely to make the needed adjustment in spending all the more difficult.

The Impact of Trade Reporting on the Interest Rate Derivatives Market

Michael Fleming, John Jackson*, Ada Li*, Asani Sarkar, and Patricia Zobel*

In recent years, regulators in the United States and abroad have begun to strengthen regulations governing over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives trading, driven by concerns over the decentralized and opaque nature of current trading practices. For example, the Dodd-Frank Act will require U.S.-based market participants to publicly report details of their interest rate derivatives (IRD) trades shortly after those transactions have been executed. Based on an analysis of new and detailed data on the trading activity of major dealers, this post discusses the possible costs and benefits of reporting requirements on the IRD market. In a previous post, we examined the same question for the credit default swap (CDS) market.

Forecasting the Great Recession: DSGE vs. Blue Chip

Marco Del Negro, Daniel Herbst,* and Frank Schorfheide

Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models have been trashed, bashed, and abused during the Great Recession and after. One of the many reasons for the bashing was the models’ alleged inability to forecast the recession itself. Oddly enough, there’s little evidence on the forecasting performance of DSGE models during this turbulent period. In the paper “DSGE Model-Based Forecasting,” prepared for Elsevier’s Handbook of Economic Forecasting, two of us (Del Negro and Schorfheide), with the help of the third (Herbst), provide some of this evidence. This post shares some of our results.

Just Released: The Federal Reserve in the 21st Century 2012 Symposium

Eric Tucker*

The Federal Reserve in the 21st Century (Fed 21) symposium on monetary policy and financial stability recently brought together over 225 college professors from around the region and the world. The annual two-day event gives professors who teach economics, finance, or business the opportunity to hear presentations from top Federal Reserve Bank of New York economists and senior staff and ask them questions. Fed 21 is part of the Bank’s broader efforts to increase public understanding of the Federal Reserve System’s role in conducting monetary policy and ensuring financial stability.