Hey, Economist! Tell Us about Your First Year as Research Director of the New York Fed

An Interview with Beverly Hirtle



A year has passed since Beverly Hirtle was named director of research for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Before assuming that position, Bev played many roles at the Bank over the last thirty years, including serving as the deputy chair of the Federal Reserve Model Oversight Group responsible for designing and implementing the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review and Dodd-Frank Act stress tests. But what was it like to become the head of the Research and Statistics Group and director of research? Hirtle offers some insight into her latest role.

Why Pay Interest on Excess Reserve Balances?

Laura Lipscomb, Antoine Martin, and Heather Wiggins



In a previous post, we described some reasons why it is beneficial to pay interest on required reserve balances. Here we turn to arguments in favor of paying interest on excess reserve balances. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and former Vice Chairman Donald Kohn recently discussed many potential benefits of paying interest on excess reserve balances and some common misunderstandings, including that paying interest on reserves restricts bank lending and provides a subsidy to banks. In this post, we focus primarily on benefits related to the efficiency of the payment system and the reduction in the need for the provision of credit by the Fed when operating in a framework of abundant reserves.

The Treasury Market Practices Group: A Consequential First Decade

Kenneth Garbade, Frank Keane, and Radhika Mithal



The Treasury Market Practices Group (TMPG) was formed in February 2007 in response to the appearance of some questionable trading practices in the secondary market for U.S. Treasury securities. (A history of the origins of the TMPG is available here.) Left unaddressed, the practices threatened to harm the efficiency and integrity of an essential global benchmark market. The Group responded by identifying and publicizing “best practices” in trading Treasury securities—a statement of behavioral norms intended to maintain a level and competitive playing field for all market participants. The Group’s focus expanded in 2008 to include market architecture issues, and again in 2010 to include the federal agency debt and mortgage-backed securities (MBS) markets.

Why Pay Interest on Required Reserve Balances?

Laura Lipscomb, Antoine Martin, and Heather Wiggins




The Federal Reserve has paid interest on reserves held by banks in their Fed accounts since 2008. Why should it do so? Here, we describe some benefits of paying interest on required reserve balances. Since forcing banks to hold unremunerated reserves would be akin to levying a tax on them, paying interest on these balances is a way to eliminate or greatly reduce that tax and its negative effects.

Just Released: A Monthly Underlying Inflation Gauge

Robert Rich



Today marks the launch of the monthly publication of the Underlying Inflation Gauge (UIG). We are reporting two UIG measures, described recently on Liberty Street Economics, that are constructed to provide an estimate of the trend, or persistent, component of inflation. One measure is derived using a large number of disaggregated price series in the consumer price index (CPI), while the second measure incorporates additional information from macroeconomic and financial variables.

The New York Fed DSGE Model Forecast—August 2017

Michael Cai, Marc Giannoni, Abhi Gupta, Pearl Li, and Argia Sbordone

This post presents our quarterly update of the economic forecasts generated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We describe very briefly our forecast and its change since May 2017.

What Drives International Bank Credit?

Mary Amiti, Patrick McGuire, and David E. Weinstein



A major question facing policymakers is how to deal with slumps in bank credit. The policy prescriptions are very different depending on whether the decline is a result of global forces, domestic demand, or supply problems in a particular banking system. We present findings from new research that exactly decompose the growth in banks’ aggregate foreign credit into these three factors. Using global banking data for the period 2000-16, we uncover some striking patterns in bilateral credit relationships between consolidated banking systems and borrowers in more than 200 countries. The most important we term the “Anna Karenina Principle” of global banking: all healthy credit relationships behave alike; each unhealthy credit relationship is unhealthy in its own way.