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188 posts on "Monetary Policy"
April 12, 2022

The Fed’s Balance Sheet Runoff: The Role of Levered NBFIs and Households

Photo: Finance and banking concept. Euro coins and us dollar banknote close-up. Abstract image of Financial system with selective focus, toned, double exposure.

In a Liberty Street Economics post that appeared yesterday, we described the mechanics of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet “runoff” when newly issued Treasury securities are purchased by banks and money market funds (MMFs). The same mechanics would largely hold true when mortgage-backed securities (MBS) are purchased by banks. In this post, we show what happens when newly issued Treasury securities are purchased by levered nonbank financial institutions (NBFIs)—such as hedge funds or nonbank dealers—and by households.

April 11, 2022

The Fed’s Balance Sheet Runoff and the ON RRP Facility

Photo: Finance and banking concept. Euro coins and us dollar banknote close-up. Abstract image of Financial system with selective focus, toned, double exposure.

A 2017 Liberty Street Economics post described the balance sheet effects of the Federal Open Market Committee’s decision to cease reinvestments of maturing securities—that is, the mechanics of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet “runoff.” At the time, the overnight reverse repo (ON RRP) facility was fairly small (less than $200 billion for most of July 2017) and was not mentioned in the post for the sake of simplicity. Today, by contrast, take-up at the ON RRP facility is much larger (over $1.5 trillion for most of 2022). In this post, we update the earlier analysis and describe how the presence of the ON RRP facility affects the mechanics of the balance sheet runoff.

March 2, 2022

Disinflation Policies with a Flat Phillips Curve

Yesterday’s post analyzed the drivers of the surge in inflation over the course of 2021 through the lens of the New York Fed DSGE model. In today’s post, we use the model to study how alternative monetary policy strategies might contribute to bringing inflation back down to 2 percent. Our main finding is that there is no monetary silver bullet. Due to a flat Phillips curve—a welldocumented feature of the economic environment of the last three decades—monetary policy can only achieve faster disinflation at a considerable cost in terms of forgone economic activity. This is true regardless of the systematic approach followed by the central bank in the model to pursue its objective.

February 14, 2022

What Are Consumers’ Inflation Expectations Telling Us Today?

image: grocery price receipt

The United States has experienced a considerable rise in inflation over the past year. In this post, we examine how consumers’ inflation expectations have responded to inflation during the pandemic period and to what extent this is different from the behavior of consumers’ expectations before the pandemic. We analyze two aspects of the response of consumers’ expectations to changing conditions. First, we examine by how much consumers revise their inflation expectations in response to inflation surprises. Second, we look at the pass-through of revisions in short-term inflation expectations to revisions in longer-term inflation expectations. We use data from the New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) and from the Michigan Survey of Consumers to measure these responses. We find that over the past two years, consumers’ shorter-horizon expectations have been highly attuned to current inflation news: one-year-ahead inflation expectations are very responsive to inflation surprises, in a pattern similar to what we witnessed before the pandemic. In contrast, three-year-ahead inflation expectations are now far less responsive to inflation surprises than they were before the pandemic, indicating that consumers are taking less signal from the recent movements in inflation about inflation at longer horizons than they did before. We also find that the pass-through from revisions in one-year-ahead expectations to revisions in longer-term expectations has declined during the pandemic relative to the pre-pandemic period. Taken together, these findings show that consumers expect inflation to behave very differently than it did before the pandemic, with a smaller share of short-term movements in inflation expected to persist into the future.

Posted at 11:00 am in Inflation, Monetary Policy, Pandemic | Permalink
January 13, 2022

The Fed’s Latest Tool: A Standing Repo Facility

In July 2021, the Federal Open Market Committee announced a new tool for monetary policy implementation: a domestic standing repurchase agreement facility. In the last post of this series, we explain what this new tool is and how it will support the effective implementation of monetary policy in the floor system through which the Fed implements policy.

Posted at 7:00 am in Federal Reserve, Monetary Policy, Repo | Permalink
January 12, 2022

How the Fed Adjusts the Fed Funds Rate within Its Target Range

At its June 2021 meeting, the FOMC maintained its target range for the fed funds rate at 0 to 25 basis points, while two of the Federal Reserve’s administered rates—interest on reserve balances and the overnight reverse repo (ON RRP) facility offering rate—each were increased by 5 basis points. What do these two simultaneous decisions mean? In today’s post, we look at “technical adjustments”—a tool the Fed can deploy to keep the FOMC’s policy rate well within the target range and support smooth market functioning.

January 11, 2022

How the Fed’s Overnight Reverse Repo Facility Works

Daily take-up at the overnight reverse repo (ON RRP) facility increased from less than $1 billion in early March 2021 to just under $2 trillion on December 31, 2021. In the second post in this series, we take a closer look at this important tool in the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy implementation framework and discuss the factors behind the recent increase in volume.

January 10, 2022

How the Federal Reserve’s Monetary Policy Implementation Framework Has Evolved

In a series of four posts, we review key elements of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy implementation framework. The framework has changed markedly in the last two decades. Prior to the global financial crisis, the Fed used a system of scarce reserves and fine-tuned the supply of reserves to maintain rate control. However, since then, the Fed has operated in a floor system, where active management of the supply of reserves no longer plays a role in rate control, but rather the Fed’s administered rates influence the federal funds rate. In this first post, we discuss the salient features of the implementation framework in a stylized way.

January 7, 2022

The Effect of Inequality on the Transmission of Monetary and Fiscal Policy

Monetary policy can have a meaningful impact on inequality, as recent theoretical and empirical studies suggest. In light of this, how should policy be conducted? And how does inequality affect the transmission of monetary policy? These are the topics covered in the second part of the recent symposium on “Heterogeneity in Macroeconomics: Implications for Policy,” hosted by the new Applied Macroeconomics and Econometrics Center (AMEC) of the New York Fed on November 12.

January 6, 2022

The Effect of Monetary and Fiscal Policy on Inequality

How does accounting for households’ heterogeneityand in particular inequality in income and wealth—change our approach to macroeconomics? What are the effects of monetary and fiscal policy on inequality, and what did we learn in this regard from the COVID-19 pandemic? What are the implications of inequality for the transmission of monetary policy, and its ability to stabilize the economy? These are some of the questions that were debated at a recent symposium on “Heterogeneity in Macroeconomics: Implications for Policy” organized by the new Applied Macroeconomics and Econometrics Center (AMEC) of the New York Fed on November 12.

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The editors are Michael Fleming, Andrew Haughwout, Thomas Klitgaard, and Asani Sarkar, all economists in the Bank’s Research Group.

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