Japanese Inflation Expectations, Revisited

Benjamin R. Mandel and Geoffrey Barnes

An important measure of success for monetary policy is a central bank’s ability to anchor inflation expectations; inflation expectations influence actual inflation and, hence, the achievement of a given inflation goal. This notion has special significance for Japan, where CPI inflation has been intermittently negative since 1994 and where it is widely believed that expectations of future inflation have been persistently negative (that is, ongoing deflation is expected). In this post, we describe and evaluate an alternative, market-based measure of Japanese inflation expectations based on international price parity conditions. We find that recent inflation expectations have attained a level substantially higher than their previous peaks over the past three years.

The Macroeconomic Effects of Forward Guidance

Marco Del Negro, Marc Giannoni, and Christina Patterson

In this post, we quantify the macroeconomic effects of central bank announcements about future federal funds rates, or forward guidance. We estimate that a commitment to lowering future rates below market expectations can have fairly strong effects on real economic activity with only small effects on inflation.

Making a Statement: How Did Professional Forecasters React to the August 2011 FOMC Statement?

Richard Crump, Stefano Eusepi, and Emanuel Moench

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) statement released on August 9, 2011, was the first to incorporate language on “forward guidance” with an explicit date tied to the Committee’s expected path of monetary policy. In this post, we exploit the timing of surveys taken before and after this statement’s release to investigate how professional forecasters changed their expectations of growth, inflation, and monetary policy. We find that the average forecast of the federal funds rate shifts considerably and closely aligns with the new language in the statement, while the average forecasts for growth and inflation change less. While there’s near unanimity among forecasters about the future path of the federal funds rate after the August 2011 FOMC statement, forecasters maintained differing views on the growth and inflation outlooks.

Why (or Why Not) Keep Paying Interest on Excess Reserves?

Gara Afonso

In the fall of 2008, the Fed added new policy tools to its portfolio of techniques for implementing monetary policy. In particular, since October 9, 2008, depository institutions in the United States have been paid interest on the balances they hold overnight at Federal Reserve Banks (see Federal Reserve Board announcement). Several other central banks, such as the European Central Bank (ECB) and the central banks of Canada, England, and Australia, have somewhat similar deposit facilities allowing banks to earn overnight rates on their balances. In this post, I discuss the benefits and costs of this new tool in an environment where excess reserves in the United States have now exceeded $1.4 trillion and account for close to 95 percent of all reserves.

Federal Reserve Liquidity Facilities Gross $22 Billion for U.S. Taxpayers

Michael Fleming

During the 2007-09 crisis, the Federal Reserve took many measures to mitigate disruptions in financial markets, including the introduction or expansion of liquidity facilities. Many studies have found that the Fed’s lending via the facilities helped stabilize financial markets. In addition, because the Fed’s loans were well collateralized and generally priced at a premium to the cost of funds, they had another, less widely noted benefit: they made money for U.S. taxpayers. In this post, I bring information together from various sources and time periods to show that the facilities generated $21.7 billion in interest and fee income.  

The New Bank Resolution Regimes and “Too-Big-to-Fail”

Jennie Bai, Christian Cabanilla, and Menno Middeldorp

During the recent financial crisis, the absence of an orderly resolution regime forced governments of several countries to provide extraordinary support to a number of systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) that were considered “too-big-to-fail.” Since then, new laws such as the Dodd-Frank Act have established a framework to resolve SIFIs without the need for government “bail-outs.” These types of laws have important implications for senior bondholders of SIFIs, as the use of the new regimes would likely expose creditors to losses. Given this change, this post investigates whether markets are adjusting their perceptions of the risk associated with global SIFIs. We find that in response to shifting regulatory regimes, investors are beginning to price in a higher risk of default on senior bonds issued by the institutions.

Is U.S. Monetary Policy Seasonal?

Richard Crump and David Lucca

Many economic time series display periodic and predictable patterns within each calendar year, generally referred to as seasonal effects. For example, retail sales tend to be higher in December than in other months. These patterns are well-known to economists, who apply statistical filters to remove seasonal effects so that the resulting series are more easily comparable across months. Because policy decisions are based on seasonally adjusted series, we wouldn’t expect the decisions to exhibit any seasonal behavior. Yet, in this post we find that the Federal Reserve has been much more likely to lower interest rates in the first month of each quarter over the past twenty-five years. While some of this seasonality is a result of meeting scheduling, a large seasonal component remains unexplained.

If Interest Rates Go Negative . . . Or, Be Careful What You Wish For

Kenneth Garbade and Jamie McAndrews

The United States has slid into eight recessions in the last fifty years. Each time, the Federal Reserve sought to revive economic activity by reducing interest rates (see chart below). However, since the end of the last recession in June 2009, the economy has continued to sputter even though short-term rates have remained near zero. The weak recovery has led some commentators to suggest that the Fed should push short-term rates even lower—below zero—so that borrowers receive, and creditors pay, interest.

Interest on Excess Reserves and Cash “Parked” at the Fed

Gaetano Antinolfi and Todd Keister

The European Central Bank recently lowered from 0.25 percent to zero the interest rate it pays on funds that Eurozone banks hold on deposit with it. On the same day, Denmark’s central bank began charging banks 0.20 percent (that is, paying a negative interest rate) on certain deposits. These events have led commentators to ask what would happen if the Federal Reserve were to reduce the interest rate that banks in the United States earn on funds in their reserve accounts from its current level of 0.25 percent. In particular, some people wonder if lowering this rate would lead banks to hold smaller deposits at the Fed and instead lend out some of these “idle” balances. In this post, we use the structure of the Fed’s balance sheet to illustrate why lowering the interest rate paid on reserve balances to zero would have no meaningful effect on the quantity of balances that banks hold on deposit at the Fed.

The Fed’s Emergency Liquidity Facilities during the Financial Crisis: The PDCF

Tobias Adrian and Ernst Schaumburg

During the height of the 2007-09 financial crisis, intermediation activities across the financial sector collapsed. In response, the Federal Reserve invoked section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act, citing “unusual and exigent circumstances,” to authorize the creation of a series of emergency lending facilities. These liquidity facilities provided last-resort-lending options to qualified borrowers in several strained markets in order to prevent the distress on Wall Street from spilling over onto Main Street. In an earlier post, we discussed the commercial paper funding facility. In this post, we review the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF), a program that represents the Fed’s first lending facility to nondepository financial institutions since the Great Depression.