Welcome to Liberty Street Economics

James McAndrews and Simon Potter

On behalf of the Research and Statistics Group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, we welcome you to our new blog, Liberty Street Economics, named after the street where the New York Fed is located. We have created this blog to augment our existing publications by providing a way for our economists to engage with the public about economic issues quickly and frequently. Further, the less technical style that we are striving for in the blog posts should make the insights from our research informative to a broader audience.

You should expect to see posts on diverse issues and from a wide variety of perspectives. We will feature the work of the more than sixty economists in the Research and Statistics Group. This staff of active researchers supports Fed policymaking by providing analytical insight into a range of public policy issues and pursuing research on fundamental questions in economics and finance. In the course of their work here, economists develop expertise on a wide range of economic issues: international economics, asset pricing, corporate finance, banking, macroeconomics, monetary economics, fiscal policy, industrial organization, microeconomics, survey techniques, regional economics, and more. We believe that the blog is an effective medium for meeting our responsibility to share our analysis with you in an accessible and timely way.

Liberty Street Economics will also publish your comments and our responses in the hope of generating valuable dialogues. Like most bloggers, we will place some restrictions on the comments that we publish (see the Comment Guidelines in the left column), and because each comment will be reviewed by our staff, we will impose a twenty-four-hour deadline for the submission of comments on each post. The author(s) of the post will then provide a response to the posted comments within an additional twenty-four hours. We think that these parameters will allow for meaningful interactions, and we will review these policies as we gain more experience.

There are some topics that you will not find in the Liberty Street Economics blog. We will not be blogging on the next policy move of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) or other issues that only the FOMC or other policymakers could know. And the blog posts will not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. Finally, because we will base our blog on analytical work, our entries will be less off-the-cuff and less likely to make sweeping or definitive statements than some blogs.

Taking all this into account, our blog editors, Erica Groshen, Don Morgan, and Robert Rich, are aiming for blog posts that are lively, clear, and analytically sound. We look forward to your feedback on how well we strike the balance among these writing goals.

We will begin by publishing new analytical posts twice per week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, except during holidays and the sensitive period leading up to, and just following, the FOMC meetings. On Fridays, our Research Library will provide a historical reading. Over time, we expect to increase the frequency of posts.

This blog is an exciting experiment for us, and we plan to refine our approach as we gain experience with publishing in this space. We look forward to having you read the blog, to hearing your comments, and to being able to respond to your comments in turn.