Liberty Street Economics
Return to Liberty Street Economics Home Page

6 posts from "September 2023"
September 27, 2023

Why Are China’s Households in the Doldrums?

Chinese people shopping on the crowded streets of HongKong

A perennial challenge with China’s growth model has been overly high investment spending relative to GDP and unusually low consumer spending, something which China has long struggled to rebalance. As China attempts to move away from credit-intensive, investment-focused growth, the economy’s growth will have to rely on higher consumer spending. However, a prolonged household borrowing binge, COVID scarring and a deep slump in the property market in China have damaged household balance sheets and eroded consumer sentiment. In this post, we examine the impact of recent shocks on Chinese household behavior for clues around the outlook for reviving consumption and economic growth in China.

September 26, 2023

Who Uses “Buy Now, Pay Later”?

Illustration of a person hunched over carrying a bag of money close to stepping into a hole with a clock on the background of the illustration. Dark blue background with light blue lettering indicating: Credit Access. Who's at Risk?

“Buy now, pay later” (BNPL) has become an increasingly popular form of payment among Americans in recent years. While BNPL provides shoppers with the flexibility to pay for goods and services over time, usually with zero interest, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has identified several areas of potential consumer harm associated with its growing use, including inconsistent consumer protections, and the risk of excessive debt accumulation and over-extension. BNPL proponents have argued that the service enables improved credit access and greater financial inclusion, with approval being quick and relatively easy. More research is needed to assess the overall risks and benefits of BNPL for consumers. As a first step, we draw on new survey data to examine the background and circumstances of consumers who receive and take up BNPL offers. We find both the availability and use of BNPL to be fairly widespread but see disproportionate take-up among consumers with unmet credit needs, limited credit access, and greater financial fragility. While BNPL expands financial inclusion, especially to those with low credit scores, there is a risk that these payment plans contribute to excessive debt accumulation and over-extension.

Posted at 10:00 am in Household Finance | Permalink
September 22, 2023

The New York Fed DSGE Model Forecast— September 2023

Editor's note: We have updated the "date of forecast" row in the forecast comparison table to display the correct year (2023, not 2024). (September 25, 2023, 5:01 p.m.)
decorative photo of line and bar chart over data

This post presents an 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 June 2023. As usual, we wish to remind our readers that the DSGE model forecast is not an official New York Fed forecast, but only an input to the Research staff’s overall forecasting process. For more information about the model and variables discussed here, see our DSGE model Q & A.

Posted at 9:00 am in DSGE, Forecasting, Macroeconomics | Permalink
September 8, 2023

Reintroducing the New York Fed Staff Nowcast

Decorative photo: blue image of close up of machinery building computer circuit boards.

“Nowcasts” of GDP growth are designed to track the economy in real time by incorporating information from an array of indicators as they are released. In April 2016, the New York Fed’s Research Group launched the New York Fed Staff Nowcast, a dynamic factor model that generated estimates of current quarter GDP growth at a weekly frequency. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic sparked widespread economic disruptions—and unprecedented fluctuations in the economic data that flow into the Staff Nowcast. This posed significant challenges to the model, leading to the suspension of publication in September 2021. Taking advantage of recent developments in time-series econometrics, we have since developed a more robust version of the Staff Nowcast model, one that better handles data volatility. In this post, we discuss the model’s new features, present estimates of current quarter GDP growth, and evaluate how the Staff Nowcast would have performed during the pandemic period. Today’s post marks the resumption of regular New York Fed Staff Nowcast releases, to be published each Friday.

Posted at 11:45 am in Forecasting, Macroeconomics | Permalink
September 7, 2023

How Large Are Inflation Revisions? The Difficulty of Monitoring Prices in Real Time

decorative: us dollar folded into a question mark with penny as the dot at the bottom on a turquoise background.

With prices quickly going up after the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation releases have rarely been as present in the public debate as in recent years. However, since inflation estimates are frequently revised, how precise are the real-time data releases? In this Liberty Street Economics post, we investigate the size and nature of revisions to inflation. We find that inflation estimates for a given month can change substantially as subsequent data vintages are released. As an example, consider March 2009. With the economy contracting amid the Global Financial Crisis, the twelve-month inflation rate for personal consumption expenditures (PCE) excluding food and energy dropped from an initial estimate of 1.8 percent to 0.8 percent in the current series. The difference is dramatic and points to the difficulty of monitoring inflation in real time. Our results suggest that there is significant uncertainty in measuring inflation, and the key features of the recent spike and subsequent moderation of inflation may look quite different in hindsight once further revisions have taken place.

Posted at 7:00 am in Inflation, Macroeconomics | Permalink
September 6, 2023

Leader‑Follower Dynamics in Shareholder Activism

wooden figures in triangular formation with the lead figure colored red.

Activist shareholders play a central role in modern corporations, influencing the capital structure, business strategy, and governance of firms. Such “blockholders” range from investors who actively jawbone or break up firms to index funds that are largely passive in that they limit themselves to voting. In between, however, is a key group of blockholders that have historically focused on trading but have embraced activism as an established business strategy in the past few decades. Campaigns involving such “trading” blockholders have become ubiquitous, increasingly targeting large-capitalization firms; further, their attacks feature multiple activists, each with individual stakes that, in isolation, are unable to control targets. In this post, we ask three questions: (1) How do trading activists build stakes before an attack, while anticipating that other investors may have similar incentives? (2) Does the nature of strategic trading change relative to settings where activism is unlikely to occur? (3) Are there trade-offs between trading and the firm’s long-term value?

Posted at 7:00 am in Financial Markets, Stocks | Permalink
About the Blog

Liberty 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.

Liberty Street Economics does not publish new posts during the blackout periods surrounding Federal Open Market Committee meetings.

The views expressed are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the New York Fed or the Federal Reserve System.

Economic Research Tracker

Image of NYFED Economic Research Tracker Icon Liberty Street Economics is available on the iPhone® and iPad® and can be customized by economic research topic or economist.

Economic Inequality

image of inequality icons for the Economic Inequality: A Research Series

This ongoing Liberty Street Economics series analyzes disparities in economic and policy outcomes by race, gender, age, region, income, and other factors.

Most Read this Year

Comment Guidelines

 

We encourage your comments and queries on our posts and will publish them (below the post) subject to the following guidelines:

Please be brief: Comments are limited to 1,500 characters.

Please be aware: Comments submitted shortly before or during the FOMC blackout may not be published until after the blackout.

Please be relevant: Comments are moderated and will not appear until they have been reviewed to ensure that they are substantive and clearly related to the topic of the post.

Please be respectful: We reserve the right not to post any comment, and will not post comments that are abusive, harassing, obscene, or commercial in nature. No notice will be given regarding whether a submission will or will
not be posted.‎

Comments with links: Please do not include any links in your comment, even if you feel the links will contribute to the discussion. Comments with links will not be posted.

Send Us Feedback

Disclosure Policy

The LSE editors ask authors submitting a post to the blog to confirm that they have no conflicts of interest as defined by the American Economic Association in its Disclosure Policy. If an author has sources of financial support or other interests that could be perceived as influencing the research presented in the post, we disclose that fact in a statement prepared by the author and appended to the author information at the end of the post. If the author has no such interests to disclose, no statement is provided. Note, however, that we do indicate in all cases if a data vendor or other party has a right to review a post.

Archives