How Well Do Financial Markets Separate News from Noise? Evidence from an Internet Blooper

Carlos Carvalho*, Nicholas Klagge*, and Emanuel Moench

How efficiently do financial markets process news of unexpected events? This question becomes particularly salient now, as multiple events across the globe drive market movements. Do these gyrations reflect responses to fundamental news or to “noise”? In general, it is very difficult to discern how well markets process information, because there is no objective way for observers to separate fundamental news from noise components when markets react to a news report. In this post, however, we examine an unusual episode involving a false news report that provides a unique look into this question. We find that even when noise can be clearly identified, markets may take as long as a week to fully process the “signal,” or relevant information, component of news.

What If the U.S. Dollar's Global Role Changed?

Linda Goldberg, Mark Choi*, and Hunter Clark*

It isn’t surprising that the dollar is always in the news, given the prominence of the United States in the global economy and how often the dollar is used in transactions around the world (as discussed in a 2010 Current Issues article). But the dollar may not retain this dominance forever. In this post, we consider and catalog the implications for the United States of a potential lessening of the dollar’s primacy in international transactions. The circumstances surrounding such a possibility are important for the effects. As long as U.S. fundamentals remain strong, key consequences could be somewhat higher funding costs and somewhat lower seigniorage revenues (the excess returns to the government of creating money), some reduced U.S. spillovers to the rest of the world, and enhanced sensitivity of the domestic economy to foreign economic conditions.