41 posts on "Fiscal Policy"
April 10, 2020
Helping State and Local Governments Stay Liquid
On April 9, the Federal Reserve announced up to $2.3 trillion in new support for the economy in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Among the initiatives is the Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF), intended to support state and local governments. The details of the facility are described in the term sheet. The state and local sector is a unique but very important part of the economy. This post lays out some of the economics of the sector and the needs that the facility intends to satisfy.
Posted at 4:25 pm in Central Bank, COVID-19 Facilities, Fiscal Policy, Monetary Policy, Pandemic | Permalink
April 6, 2020
How the Fed Managed the Treasury Yield Curve in the 1940s
The coronavirus pandemic has prompted the Federal Reserve to pledge to purchase Treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities in the amount needed to support the smooth market functioning and effective transmission of monetary policy to the economy. But some market participants have questioned whether something more might not be required, including possibly some form of direct yield curve control. In the first half of the 1940s the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) sought to manage the level and shape of the Treasury yield curve. In this post, we examine what can be learned from the FOMC’s efforts of seventy-five years ago.
Posted at 7:00 am in Economic History, Fed Funds, Federal Reserve, Fiscal Policy, Pandemic, Treasury | Permalink
February 24, 2020
Understanding Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian Models: Insights from a PRANK
To shed light on the macroeconomic consequences of heterogeneity, Acharya and Dogra develop a stylized HANK model that contains key features present in more complicated HANK models.
Posted at 7:00 am in Central Bank, Credit, Federal Reserve, Financial Institutions, Fiscal Policy, Inequality, Macroeconomics, Monetary Policy, Recession, Systemic Risk | Permalink
April 17, 2019
Did Tax Reform Raise the Cost of Owning a Home?
The 2018 slowdown in the housing market has been a subject of intense interest to the press and policymakers, including articles reporting a slowing in house price growth and a decline in home construction. Today we follow up on our colleagues’ research on whether the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) has contributed to a slowdown in the housing market, looking closely at what price signals tell us about the trade-off between owning and renting.
April 15, 2019
Is the Recent Tax Reform Playing a Role in the Decline of Home Sales?
From the fourth quarter of 2017 through the third quarter of 2018, the average contract interest rate on new thirty-year fixed rate mortgages rose by roughly 70 basis points—from 3.9 percent to 4.6 percent. During this same period, there was a broad-based slowing in housing market activity with sales of new single-family homes declining by 7.4 percent while sales of existing single-family homes fell by 4.4 percent. Interestingly though, these declines in home sales were larger than in the two previous episodes when mortgage interest rates rose by a comparable amount. This post considers whether provisions in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) might have also contributed to the recent decline in housing market activity.
April 11, 2018
How Will the New Tax Law Affect Homeowners in High Tax States? It Depends
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) introduces significant changes to the federal income tax code for individuals and businesses. Several provisions of the new tax law are particularly significant for the owner-occupied housing market. In this blog post, we compare the federal tax liability and the marginal after-tax cost of mortgage interest and property taxes under the old and new tax codes for a wide range of hypothetical recent home buyers in a high tax state. We find that impacts vary substantially along the income/home price distribution.
August 8, 2016
Restoring Economic Growth in Puerto Rico: Introduction to the Series
The difficult economic and financial issues facing the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico have remained very much in the news since our post on options for addressing its fiscal problems appeared last fall. That post was itself a follow-up on a series of analyses, starting with a 2012 report that detailed the economic challenges facing the Commonwealth. In 2014, we extended that analysis with an update where we focused more closely on the fiscal challenges facing the Island. As the problems deepened, we have continued to examine important related subjects ranging from positive revisions in employment data, to the understanding emigration, and to considering how the Commonwealth’s public debts stack up. In most of this work, we have focused on how policymakers could help to address the immediate issues facing the Island and its people. The U.S. Congress and the Obama Administration took action in June to provide a framework to help address Puerto Rico’s fiscal crisis. But much remains to be done to address these ongoing problems, which represent a significant impediment to economic growth in the short run. It also seems important to revisit the question of the prospects for reviving longer-run growth in the Commonwealth. These concerns were underscored by projections published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the April edition of the World Economic Outlook that forecast Puerto Rico’s real GDP and population to decline through 2021.
Posted at 7:00 am in Credit, Employment, Fed Funds, Fiscal Policy, Forecasting, Inflation, International Economics, Puerto Rico, Regional Analysis | Permalink | Comments (1)
July 18, 2016
Forecasting Interest Rates over the Long Run
In a previous post, we showed how market rates on U.S. Treasuries violate the expectations hypothesis because of time-varying risk premia.
Posted at 7:00 am in Expectations, Financial Markets, Fiscal Policy, Forecasting, Household Finance, Inflation, Treasury | Permalink | Comments (1)
July 8, 2016
Hey, Economist! Why—and When—Did the Treasury Embrace Regular and Predictable Issuance?
Few people know the Treasury market from as many angles as Ken Garbade, a senior vice president in the Money and Payments Studies area of the New York Fed’s Research Group. Ken taught financial markets at NYU’s graduate school of business for many years before heading to Wall Street to assume a position in the research department of the primary dealer division of Bankers Trust Company. At Bankers, Ken conducted relative-value research on the Treasury market, assessing how return varies relative to risk for particular Treasury securities. For a time, he also traded single-payment Treasury obligations known as STRIPS—although not especially successfully, he notes.
Posted at 7:00 am in Economic History, Fed Funds, Financial Institutions, Fiscal Policy, Hey, Economist!, Treasury | Permalink
June 22, 2016
The Rapidly Changing Nature of Japan’s Public Debt
Japan’s general government debt-to-GDP ratio is the highest of advanced economies, due in part to increased spending on social services for an aging population and a level of GDP that has not increased for two decades.
Posted at 7:00 am in Bank Capital, Exchange Rates, Fiscal Policy, Monetary Policy | Permalink | Comments (6)
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