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Liberty Street Economics
15 posts from May 2015May 29, 2015
Historical Echoes: Move Over Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard, Let’s Pay Homage to the -- Stereoscopic Viewer!
Within the New York Public Library Digital Collections is the Robert N. Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views. Stereoscopic photographs were viewed with a stereoscopic viewer or stereoscope. According to the “About” tab of the NYPL page for the collection, “During the period between the 1850s and the 1910s, stereos were a mainstay of home entertainment, perhaps second only to reading as a personal leisure activity.” They also functioned as a way for people to travel vicariously, or as an aid to the study of history and other cultures. You know you’ve found an image meant to be seen with a stereoscopic viewer when it is double, with the images slightly askew from one another. The kinds of images that were particularly suitable as subjects for stereoscopic photography were those involving objects at varying distances from the viewer (for example, landscapes and cityscapes). (This is only one form of stereoscopy, which incorporates other technologies.)
May 28, 2015
Just Released: 2015 SCE Housing Survey Shows Households Optimistic about Housing Market
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York today released results from its 2015 SCE Housing Survey. The survey, administered to 1,205 U.S. household heads in February, is a follow-up to the one conducted in February 2014. The purpose of the effort is to collect rich and high-quality information on consumers’ experiences and expectations regarding housing. The survey collects data on individuals’ perceptions and expectations of the growth in home prices, intentions regarding moving or buying a new home, and their access to credit, among other things.
Just Released: What Do Banking Supervisors Do?
In most developed economies, banking is among the most regulated and supervised sectors. While “regulation” and “supervision” are often used interchangeably, these two activities are distinct. Banking supervision is a complement to regulation, but its scope is much broader than simply ensuring that an institution is in compliance with regulation. Despite the importance of supervision, information about it is often limited, both because of the heavy reliance upon banks’ confidential information and because many supervisory activities and actions are themselves confidential. In a recently released Staff Report, we shed more light on the topic by describing the Federal Reserve’s supervisory approach for large, complex financial institutions and how supervision of such firms is conducted on a day-to-day basis at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as part of this broader supervisory program.
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May 27, 2015
The Eurodollar Market in the United States
In February, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s trading desk announced it will publish a new overnight bank funding rate early next year. The new rate will be based on both federal funds and Eurodollar transactions reported in a new data collection—the FR 2420 Report of Selected Money Market Rates. In a previous post, we explained how FR 2420 fed funds transaction data will replace brokered data as the base for the fed funds effective rate. This post provides insights on the Eurodollar market in advance of the publication of the overnight bank funding rate.
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Posted by Blog Author at 7:00 AM in Exchange Rates, Fed Funds, Financial Markets, Monetary Policy | Permalink | Comments (0)May 20, 2015
Why Are Interest Rates So Low?
Second post in the seriesIn a recent series of blog posts, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, Ben Bernanke, has asked the question: “Why are interest rates so low?” (See part 1, part 2, and part 3.) He refers, of course, to the fact that the U.S. government is able to borrow at an annualized rate of around 2 percent for ten years, or around 3 percent for thirty years. If you expect that inflation is going to be on average 2 percent over the next ten or thirty years, this implies that the U.S. government can borrow at real rates of interest between 0 and 1 percent at the ten- and thirty-year maturities. This phenomenon is by no means limited to the United States. Governments in Japan and Germany are able to borrow for ten years at nominal rates below 1 percent, and the ten-year yield on Swiss government debt is slightly negative. Why is that?
Posted by Blog Author at 7:00 AM in DSGE, Financial Markets, Household, Macroecon, Monetary Policy, Wages | Permalink | Comments (7)May 18, 2015
The FRBNY DSGE Model Forecast--April 2015
First in a two-part series
There are various types of economic forecasts, such as judgmental forecasts or model-based forecasts. In this post, we provide an update of the economic forecasts implied by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s (FRBNY) dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model, which we introduced in a series of five blog posts in September 2014 here. It continues to predict a gradual recovery in economic activity with a progressive but slow return of inflation toward the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) long-run target of 2 percent. This forecast remains surrounded by significant uncertainty. Please note that the DSGE model forecasts are not the official New York Fed staff forecasts, but only an input to the overall forecasting process at the Bank.
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Posted by Blog Author at 7:00 AM in DSGE, Forecasting, Macroecon, Monetary Policy, Wages | Permalink | Comments (0)May 15, 2015
Just Released: The New York Fed Staff Forecast, May 2015
Today, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) is hosting the spring meeting of its Economic Advisory Panel (EAP). As has become custom at this meeting, FRBNY staff are presenting their forecast for U.S. growth, inflation, and unemployment through the end of 2016. Following the presentation, members of the EAP, which consists of leading economists in academia and the private sector, are asked to discuss the staff forecast. Such feedback helps the staff evaluate the assumptions and reasoning underlying the forecast and the key risks to it. Subjecting the staff forecast to periodic evaluation is also important because it informs the staff’s discussions with New York Fed President William Dudley about economic conditions. In that same spirit, we are sharing a short summary of the staff forecast in this post. For more detail, please see the material from the EAP meeting on our website.
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Posted by Blog Author at 10:30 AM in Exports, Forecasting, Inflation, Macroecon, Monetary Policy, Unemployment | Permalink | Comments (0)The Class of 2015 Might Have a Little Better Luck Finding a Good Job
With the college graduation season well under way, a new crop of freshly minted graduates is entering the job market and many bright young minds are hoping to land a good first job. It’s no wonder if they are approaching the job hunt with some trepidation. For a number of years now, recent college graduates have been struggling to find good jobs. However, the labor market for college graduates is improving. After declining for nearly two years, openings for jobs requiring a college degree have picked up since last summer. Not only has this increase in the demand for educated workers continued to push down the unemployment rate for recent graduates, but it has also finally started to help reduce underemployment, though the underemployment rate remains high. While successfully navigating the job market will likely remain a challenge, it appears that finding a good job has become just a little bit easier for the class of 2015.
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Posted by Blog Author at 7:00 AM in Education, Labor Economics, Unemployment | Permalink | Comments (0)May 13, 2015
Financial Innovation: Evolution of the Tri-Party Repo Arrangement
Second in a two-part seriesIn our earlier post, we described how the tri-party repo arrangement was a clever way to reduce the costs and risks that individual firms faced when settling bilateral repos. In this post, we explain how the efficiencies created by this new arrangement facilitated the growth of the repo market by expanding the class of securities to be used as collateral. This expansion had benefits as well as costs. On the positive side, it led to lower interest costs for a wide variety of borrowers in the real economy. But on the negative side, tri-party repos backed by riskier assets increase the risk of fire sales, which can have negative spillovers on the broader financial system.
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May 12, 2015
Just Released: Mortgage Borrowing among Most Creditworthy Abates
Today’s release of the New York Fed’s Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit for the first quarter of 2015 reports a flattening in household debt balances. The slow growth in debt balances has left many wondering about the dynamics behind this change—who is borrowing, and who is paying down their balances? Thus, we use the same data set, the New York Fed Consumer Credit Panel (which is itself based on Equifax credit data) to identify the changes in balances by credit score, updating a post from last year with more recent data and also providing an in-depth look at the change in mortgage balances.
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About the BlogLiberty Street Economics features insight and analysis from New York Fed economists working at the intersection of research and policy. Launched in 2011, the blog takes its name from the Bank’s headquarters at 33 Liberty Street in Manhattan’s Financial District.
The editors are Michael Fleming, Andrew Haughwout, Thomas Klitgaard, and Asani Sarkar, all economists in the Bank’s Research Group.
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