Liberty Street Economics

August 5, 2026

AI’s Impact on Labor and Hiring

Kartik B. Athreya

Street level column by Research Director Kartik Athreya. Image of Athreya on top of a photo of a large room with rows of desks and laptops with only one man sitting at one desk working.

Welcome to Street Level, my new series on Liberty Street Economics. As research director, I try to keep track of the wide range of work that the economists at the New York Fed produce. My goal for this series is to periodically offer some thematic discussion of that work, highlighting recent analysis by Research staff and adding my own observations on the issue at hand. In this inaugural post, I’ll focus on perhaps the hottest topic going: How artificial intelligence is changing the labor market and hiring behaviors.

Posted at 7:00 am in Artificial Intelligence (AI) | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 4, 2026

A Window into Bond Investors’ Uncertainty About R‑Star

Guillaume Roussellet

Image of an interest rate sign with a magnifying glass hovering over it. Black and gray background with interest rates in gray on it.

Monetary policymakers closely monitor the term structure of sovereign bond yields to uncover market participants’ beliefs about the future monetary policy stance, inflation, and activity. A particular object of interest is the natural real rate of return, or “r-star,” which acts as a guide for monetary policy decisions. Numerous papers have questioned how much information investors possess, and how precisely they know r-star. In this post based on a recent Staff Report, we explore what the term structure of interest rates can teach us about r-star and its perception by investors.

Posted at 7:00 am in Central Bank, Financial Markets, Inflation, Macroeconomics, Monetary Policy | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 31, 2026

Stablecoins and (Non)Crypto Shocks: A 2026 Update

Kenechukwu Anadu, Pablo D. Azar, Sean Baker, Marco Cipriani, Thomas M. Eisenbach, Mattia Landoni, Gabriele La Spada, Marco Macchiavelli, and J. Christina Wang

decorative image of bar chart and circle with stablecoin written on dark background.

Stablecoins are digital assets whose value is pegged to that of a fiat currency, typically the U.S. dollar at a peg of $1.00 per token. In a previous blog post, we described the rapid growth of stablecoins through early 2025, highlighted changes in stablecoins’ reserve-asset composition, and examined their reactions to Bitcoin price shocks. In this post, we document the growth of stablecoins since our last post. Then, we examine how shocks from outside the crypto industry can impact the composition of stablecoins’ reserve assets. For our case study, we use the 2023 failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and its impact on USD Coin (USDC, issued by Circle), the second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization.

Posted at 7:00 am in Cryptocurrencies | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 17, 2026

Nonbank Subsidiaries and the Hidden Fragility of Internal Capital Markets Reallocation

Nicola Cetorelli and Shohini Kundu

AI generated image of a glass square vessel with glass squares and pyramid inside with the words Bank Holding Company on the large vessel and insurer, fintech and broker-dealer on the small glass items inside it.

This post concludes a three-part series on how bank regulation interacts with the organizational structure of banking firms. The first post documented the equity-rich nonbank subsidiaries inside bank holding companies (BHCs); the second post showed that BHCs met Basel III by reallocating capital internally, moving equity from nonbank affiliates to bank subsidiaries rather than raising new external capital. Here we ask what that reallocation meant for financial stability. The series draws on the authors’ recent Staff Report, “Regulatory Arbitrage Within the Firm.”

Posted at 7:00 am in Banks, Nonbank (NBFI), Regulation | Permalink | Comments (1)

July 16, 2026

How Basel III Changes Where Capital Sits: Nonbank Subsidiaries as Equity Reservoirs

Nicola Cetorelli and Shohini Kundu

This post is the second in a three-part series on how bank regulation interacts with the organizational structure of banking firms. The first post documented that nonbank subsidiaries inside bank holding companies (BHCs) are large, equity-rich “reservoirs,” and that bank-level capital diverged sharply from consolidated capital after Basel III took effect in 2015. This post asks why, and traces the answer through the internal plumbing of the holding company. The series draws on the authors’ recent Staff Report, “Regulatory Arbitrage Within the Firm.”

Posted at 9:00 am in Banks, Nonbank (NBFI), Regulation | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 15, 2026

Capitalizing on Nonbanks: Regulatory Arbitrage Within Bank Holding Companies

Nicola Cetorelli and Shohini Kundu

This post is the first in a three-part series on how bank regulation interacts with the organizational structure of banking firms. The series draws on the authors’ recent Staff Report, “Regulatory Arbitrage Within the Firm.”

Posted at 1:00 pm in Banks, Nonbank (NBFI), Regulation | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 9, 2026

Effect of Tariffs on U.S. Small Businesses

Will Aarons and Asani Sarkar

Photo of men and women sitting at sewing machines all in a row handling blue material.

How has the recent implementation of tariffs affected small businesses? Due to lack of data, little is known about this issue. In this Liberty Street Economics post, we use data from the 2025 edition of the Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS) to explore this question for businesses nationally and in the Second District (defined, for the purpose of this study, as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut). We find that the majority of national firms in the goods and retail sectors reported experiencing financial challenges due to tariffs in 2025, with even larger shares of regional firms doing so. In response, about 80 percent of national and regional firms passed on at least some of the higher costs of imported inputs to customers, while about 60 percent absorbed some of the costs, as many firms did some of both. Firms that faced greater tariff challenges in 2025 were more pessimistic about employment and revenues in 2026.

Posted at 7:00 am in Regional Analysis, Tariffs | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 8, 2026

More Tariff Pass‑Through Is in the Pipeline

Jaison R. Abel, Mary Amiti, Richard Deitz, Sebastian Heise, and Nick Montalbano

Workers on a production line in white protective gear assembling semiconductors on memory boards that are moving on a conveyor belt.

The past year brought dramatic changes to U.S. trade policy, including sweeping new tariffs, as well as a Supreme Court decision that further reshaped the tariff landscape. Many businesses saw their costs increase significantly and faced complex decisions about whether to absorb the tariffs through lower profit margins, raise their prices to recover the higher costs, or some combination of the two. Last year, we found that most businesses had passed on at least some of these higher costs to their customers through higher prices. Now, over a year later, have businesses finished adjusting prices, or do further tariff-induced price increases lie ahead? Our latest regional business surveys reveal that nearly half of firms that have paid tariffs still plan additional price increases to offset these costs, with some expecting to raise prices six months or more in the future.

Posted at 7:00 am in Tariffs | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 7, 2026

What Do Over 3,000 Bank Runs Teach Us About Banking Crises?

Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck, and Emil Verner

Black and white photo of a bank run on the American Union Bank which collapsed and went out of business on June 30, 1931.

Runs on financial institutions are one of the salient markers of financial crises. But the role of runs in crises is a topic of longstanding debate. Runs can be seen as the key turning point, whereby even small shocks can generate severe crises with widespread bank failures. Another view is that runs are mainly a symptom of deeper rot in the financial system, exacerbating crises rather than being their primary cause. Understanding this debate has first order implications for how to think about financial crises and the appropriate policy responses. In this post, we use a new database of more than 3,000 bank runs (introduced in our companion post) to show that poor fundamentals are central to explaining both when runs occur and when they have severe economic effects. We argue that this evidence tempers the view that small shocks can have outsized real effects through self-fulfilling run dynamics.

Posted at 10:01 am in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Banks, Crisis, Liquidity | Permalink | Comments (1)

Using AI to Let History Speak About Bank Runs

Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck, and Emil Verner

Created image of an early 20th Century bank run with pink, blue and yellow flow concept. Querying, analysing, visualizing neural network for artificial intelligence. Data mining.

Banking crises are commonly associated with bank runs and banking panics, yet our empirical understanding of bank runs is constrained by a lack of bank-level data. In a new paper, we use large language models (LLMs) to extract information on bank runs from millions of digitized historical newspaper pages, creating the most comprehensive database of bank runs in U.S. history. Every bank run episode that we identify is documented on a companion website where users can browse and examine individual episodes, and read the original newspaper articles. In this post, we describe how we built this dataset and discuss what its basic features reveal.

Posted at 10:00 am in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Banks, Crisis, Liquidity | Permalink | Comments (0)

Markets & Policy Implementation

Liberty Street Economics

AI’s Impact on Labor and Hiring

A Window into Bond Investors’ Uncertainty About R‑Star

Stablecoins and (Non)Crypto Shocks: A 2026 Update

Nonbank Subsidiaries and the Hidden Fragility of Internal Capital Markets Reallocation

How Basel III Changes Where Capital Sits: Nonbank Subsidiaries as Equity Reservoirs

Capitalizing on Nonbanks: Regulatory Arbitrage Within Bank Holding Companies

Effect of Tariffs on U.S. Small Businesses

More Tariff Pass‑Through Is in the Pipeline

What Do Over 3,000 Bank Runs Teach Us About Banking Crises?

Using AI to Let History Speak About Bank Runs

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