56 posts on "Central Bank"
May 17, 2023
Look Out for Outlook-at-Risk
The timely characterization of risks to the economic outlook plays an important role in both economic policy and private sector decisions. In a February 2023 Liberty Street Economics post, we introduced the concept of “Outlook-at-Risk”—that is, the downside risk to real activity and two-sided risks to inflation. Today we are launching Outlook-at-Risk as a regularly updated data product, with new readings for the conditional distributions of real GDP growth, the unemployment rate, and inflation to be published each month. In this post, we use the data on conditional distributions to investigate how two-sided risks to inflation and downside risks to real activity have evolved over the current and previous five monetary policy tightening cycles.
Posted at 10:00 am in Central Bank, Financial Markets, FOMC, Macroeconomics, Monetary Policy | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 14, 2023
Is the Green Transition Inflationary?
Are policies aimed at fighting climate change inflationary? In a new staff report we use a simple model to argue that this does not have to be the case. The model suggests that climate policies do not force a central bank to tolerate higher inflation but may generate a trade-off between inflation and employment objectives. The presence and size of this trade-off depends on how flexible prices are in the “dirty” and “green” sectors relative to the rest of the economy, and on whether climate policies consist of taxes or subsidies.
January 11, 2023
Foreign Banking Organizations in the United States and the Price of Dollar Liquidity
Foreign banking organizations (FBOs) in the United States play an important role in setting the price of short-term dollar liquidity. In this post, based on remarks given at the 2022 Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, we highlight FBOs’ activities in money markets and discuss how the availability of reserve balances affects these activities. Understanding the dynamics of FBOs’ business models and their balance sheet constraints helps us monitor the evolution of liquidity conditions during quantitative easing (QE) and tightening (QT) cycles.
November 21, 2022
How Do Deposit Rates Respond to Monetary Policy?
When the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) wants to raise the target range for the fed funds rate, it raises the interest on reserve balances (IORB) paid to banks, the primary credit rate offered to banks, and the award rate paid to participants that invest in the overnight reverse repo (ON RRP) market to keep the fed funds rate within the target range (see prior Liberty Street Economics posts on this topic). When these rates change, market participants respond by adjusting the valuation of financial products, of which a significant category is deposits. Understanding how deposit terms adapt to changes in policy rates is important to understanding the impact of monetary policy more broadly. In this post, we evaluate the pass through of the fed funds rate to deposit rates (that is, deposit betas) over the past several interest rate cycles and discuss factors that affect deposit rates.
October 5, 2022
Measuring the Ampleness of Reserves
Over the past fifteen years, reserves in the banking system have grown from tens of billions of dollars to several trillion dollars. This extraordinary rise poses a natural question: Are the rates paid in the market for reserves still sensitive to changes in the quantity of reserves when aggregate reserve holdings are so large? In today’s post, we answer this question by estimating the slope of the reserve demand curve from 2010 to 2022, when reserves ranged from $1 trillion to $4 trillion.
Posted at 7:00 am in Banks, Central Bank, Federal Reserve, Financial Institutions, Financial Markets, Monetary Policy | Permalink
April 12, 2022
The Fed’s Balance Sheet Runoff: The Role of Levered NBFIs and Households
In a Liberty Street Economics post that appeared yesterday, we described the mechanics of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet “runoff” when newly issued Treasury securities are purchased by banks and money market funds (MMFs). The same mechanics would largely hold true when mortgage-backed securities (MBS) are purchased by banks. In this post, we show what happens when newly issued Treasury securities are purchased by levered nonbank financial institutions (NBFIs)—such as hedge funds or nonbank dealers—and by households.
Posted at 7:00 am in Central Bank, COVID-19 Facilities, Federal Reserve, Monetary Policy, Nonbank (NBFI) | Permalink | Comments (1)
April 11, 2022
The Fed’s Balance Sheet Runoff and the ON RRP Facility
A 2017 Liberty Street Economics post described the balance sheet effects of the Federal Open Market Committee’s decision to cease reinvestments of maturing securities—that is, the mechanics of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet “runoff.” At the time, the overnight reverse repo (ON RRP) facility was fairly small (less than $200 billion for most of July 2017) and was not mentioned in the post for the sake of simplicity. Today, by contrast, take-up at the ON RRP facility is much larger (over $1.5 trillion for most of 2022). In this post, we update the earlier analysis and describe how the presence of the ON RRP facility affects the mechanics of the balance sheet runoff.
Posted at 7:00 am in Central Bank, COVID-19 Facilities, Federal Reserve, Monetary Policy, Repo | Permalink | Comments (3)
February 7, 2022
The Future of Payments Is Not Stablecoins
Stablecoins, which we define as digital assets used as a medium of exchange that are purported to be backed by assets held specifically for that purpose, have grown considerably in the last two years. They rose from a market capitalization of $5.7 billion on December 1, 2019, to $155.6 billion on January 21, 2022. Moreover, a market that was once dominated by a single stablecoin—Tether (USDT)—now boasts five stablecoins with valuations over $1 billion (as of January 21, 2022; data about the supply of stablecoins can be found here). Analysts have started to pay increased attention to the stablecoin market, and the President’s Working Group (PWG) on Financial Markets released a report on stablecoins on November 1, 2021. In this post, we explain why we believe stablecoins are unlikely to be the future of payments.
January 12, 2022
How the Fed Adjusts the Fed Funds Rate within Its Target Range
At its June 2021 meeting, the FOMC maintained its target range for the fed funds rate at 0 to 25 basis points, while two of the Federal Reserve’s administered rates—interest on reserve balances and the overnight reverse repo (ON RRP) facility offering rate—each were increased by 5 basis points. What do these two simultaneous decisions mean? In today’s post, we look at “technical adjustments”—a tool the Fed can deploy to keep the FOMC’s policy rate well within the target range and support smooth market functioning.
January 11, 2022
How the Fed’s Overnight Reverse Repo Facility Works
Daily take-up at the overnight reverse repo (ON RRP) facility increased from less than $1 billion in early March 2021 to just under $2 trillion on December 31, 2021. In the second post in this series, we take a closer look at this important tool in the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy implementation framework and discuss the factors behind the recent increase in volume.
Posted at 7:00 am in Bank Capital, Banks, Central Bank, COVID-19 Facilities, Credit, Crisis, Fed Funds, Federal Reserve, Financial Institutions, Monetary Policy, Pandemic, Repo | Permalink
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