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48 posts on "Federal Reserve"September 24, 2021Have Consumers’ Long-Run Inflation Expectations Become Un-Anchored?
With the recent surge in inflation since the spring there has been an increase in consumers’ short-run (one-year ahead) and, to a lesser extent, medium-run (three-year ahead) inflation expectations (see Survey of Consumer Expectations). Although this rise in short- and medium-run inflation expectations is relevant for policymakers, it does not provide direct evidence about “un-anchoring” of long-run inflation expectations. Roughly speaking, inflation expectations are considered un-anchored when long-run inflation expectations change significantly in response to developments in inflation or other economic variables, and begin to move away from levels consistent with the central bank’s (implicit or explicit) inflation objective. In that case, actual inflation can become unmoored and risks drifting persistently away from the central bank’s objective. Well-anchored long-run inflation expectations therefore represent an important measure of the success of monetary policy. In this post, we look at the current anchoring of consumers’ long-run inflation expectations using novel data from the Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE). Our results suggest that in August 2021 consumers’ five-year ahead inflation expectations were as well anchored as they were two years ago, before the start of the pandemic.
July 12, 2021Tailoring Regulations
Regulations are not written in stone. The benefits derived from them, along with the costs of compliance for affected institutions and of enforcement for regulators, are likely to evolve. When this happens, regulators may seek to modify the regulations to better suit the specific risk profiles of regulated entities. In this post, we consider the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act (EGRRCPA) passed by Congress in 2018, which eased banking regulations for smaller institutions. We focus on one regulation—the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR)—and assess how its relaxation affected newly exempt banks’ assets and liabilities, and the resilience of the banking system.
Posted at 7:00 am in Bank Capital, Banks, Dodd-Frank, Federal Reserve, Financial Intermediation, Fire Sale, Liquidity, Regulation | Permalink | Comments (2)March 19, 2021Looking Back at 10 Years of Liberty Street Economics
This month the Liberty Street Economics blog is celebrating its tenth anniversary. We first welcomed readers to Liberty Street on March 21, 2011 and since then our annual page views have grown from just over 260,000 to more than 3.3 million.
February 5, 2021Up on Main Street
The Main Street Lending Program was the last of the facilities launched by the Fed and Treasury to support the flow of credit during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21. The others primarily targeted Wall Street borrowers; Main Street was for smaller firms that rely more on banks for credit. It was a complicated program that worked by purchasing loans and sharing risk with lenders. Despite its delayed launch, Main Street purchased more debt than any other facility and was accelerating when it closed in January 2021. This post first locates Main Street in the constellation of COVID-19 credit programs, then looks in detail at its design and usage with an eye toward any future programs.
Posted at 7:00 am in Bank Capital, Banks, Central Bank, COVID-19 Facilities, Credit, Federal Reserve, Financial Institutions, Financial Intermediation, Financial Markets, Fiscal Policy, Monetary Policy, Pandemic | Permalink | Comments (0)November 24, 2020How Bank Reserves Are Distributed Matters. How You Measure Their Distribution Matters Too.
Changes in the distribution of banks’ reserve balances are important since they may impact conditions in the federal funds market and alter trading dynamics in money markets more generally. In this post, we propose using the Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient as a new approach to measuring reserve concentration. Since 2013, concentration, as captured by the Lorenz curve and the Gini coefficient, has co-moved with aggregate reserves, decreasing as aggregate reserves declined (such as in 2015-18) and increasing as aggregate reserves increased (such as at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic).
Posted at 7:00 am in Bank Capital, Banks, Fed Funds, Federal Reserve, Financial Markets, Inequality, Panic | Permalink | Comments (0)September 22, 2020Expanding the Toolkit: Facilities Established to Respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic
Anna Kovner and Antoine Martin argue that the “credit” and lending facilities established by the Fed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, while unprecedented, are a natural extension of the central bank’s existing toolkit.
Posted at 7:00 am in Central Bank, Crisis, Federal Reserve, Liquidity, Monetary Policy, Pandemic | Permalink | Comments (0)August 24, 2020Explaining the Puzzling Behavior of Short-Term Money Market Rates
Since 2008, the Federal Reserve has dramatically increased the supply of bank reserves, effectively adopting a floor system for monetary policy implementation. Since then, the behavior of short-term money market rates has been at times puzzling. In particular, short-term rates have been surprisingly firm in recent months, despite the large increase in reserves by the Fed as a part of its response to the coronavirus pandemic. In this post, we provide evidence that both the supply of reserves and the supply of short-term Treasury securities are important factors for explaining short-term rates.
August 20, 2020Market Function Purchases by the Federal Reserve
This post describes efforts taken by the Federal Reserve to support and sustain the Treasury and MBS markets following the COVID-19 outbreak as well as prior “market functioning” interventions in 1939, 1958, and 1970.
July 17, 2020MBS Market Dysfunctions in the Time of COVID-19
Haoyang Liu, Asani Sarkar, and coauthors study a particular aspect of MBS market disruptions by showing how a long-standing relationship between cash and forward markets broke down, in spite of dealers increasing the provision of liquidity. The analysis also highlights an innovative response by the Federal Reserve that seemed to have helped to normalize market functioning.
Posted at 7:00 am in Dealers, Federal Reserve, Financial Institutions, Financial Markets, Fire Sale | Permalink | Comments (2)July 16, 2020Federal Reserve Agency CMBS Purchases
On March 23, the Open Market Trading Desk (the Desk) at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York initiated plans to purchase agency commercial mortgage-backed securities (agency CMBS) at the direction of the FOMC in order to support smooth market functioning of the markets for these securities. This post describes the deterioration in market conditions that led to agency CMBS purchases, how the Desk conducts these operations, and how market functioning has improved since the start of the purchase operations.
Posted at 9:38 am in Dealers, Federal Reserve, Financial Intermediation, Financial Markets, Fire Sale | Permalink | Comments (1)Economic Research Tracker
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