241 posts on "Macroeconomics"
May 23, 2023
Financial Stability and Interest Rates
In a recent research paper we argue that interest rates have very different consequences for current versus future financial stability. In the short run, lower real rates mean higher asset prices and hence higher net worth for financial institutions. In the long run, lower real rates lead intermediaries to shift their portfolios toward risky assets, making them more vulnerable over time. In this post, we use a model to highlight the challenging trade-offs faced by policymakers in setting interest rates.
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, Forecasting, Macroeconomics, Monetary Policy | Permalink
May 10, 2023
Assessing the Outlook for Employment across Industries
Job gains exceeded output growth in 2022, bringing GDP per worker back down to its trend level after being well above for an extended period. Employment is consequently set to grow slower than output going forward, as it typically does. Breaking down the GDP per worker by industry, though, shows a significant divergence between the services and goods-producing sectors. Productivity in the services sector was modestly above its pre-pandemic path at the end of last year, suggesting room for relatively strong employment growth, with the gap particularly large in the health care, professional and business services, and leisure and hospitality sectors. Productivity in goods-producing industries, though, was depressed, implying that payroll growth is set to lag that sector’s GDP growth.
May 5, 2023
MCT Update: Inflation Persistence Continued to Decline in March
This post presents an updated estimate of inflation persistence, following the release of personal consumption expenditure (PCE) price data for March 2023. The estimates are obtained by the Multivariate Core Trend (MCT), a model we introduced on Liberty Street Economics last year and covered most recently in a March post. The MCT is a dynamic factor model estimated on monthly data for the seventeen major sectors of the PCE price index. It decomposes each sector’s inflation as the sum of a common trend, a sector-specific trend, a common transitory shock, and a sector-specific transitory shock. The trend in PCE inflation is constructed as the sum of the common and the sector-specific trends weighted by the expenditure shares.
April 6, 2023
MCT Update: Inflation Persistence Declined Modestly in February
This post presents an updated estimate of inflation persistence, following the release of personal consumption expenditure (PCE) price data for February 2023. The estimates are obtained by the Multivariate Core Trend (MCT), a model we introduced on Liberty Street Economics last year and covered most recently in a February post. The MCT is a dynamic factor model estimated on monthly data for the seventeen major sectors of the PCE price index. It decomposes each sector’s inflation as the sum of a common trend, a sector-specific trend, a common transitory shock, and a sector-specific transitory shock. The trend in PCE inflation is constructed as the sum of the common and the sector-specific trends weighted by the expenditure shares.
March 24, 2023
The New York Fed DSGE Model Forecast—March 2023
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 December 2022. Note that this forecast was produced on February 27, and hence should be viewed as reflecting the state of the economy before the current banking sector turmoil.
March 9, 2023
Inflation Persistence: Dissecting the News in January PCE Data
This post presents updated estimates of inflation persistence, following the release of personal consumption expenditure (PCE) price data for January 2023. The estimates are obtained by the Multivariate Core Trend (MCT), a model we introduced on Liberty Street Economics last year and covered most recently here and here. The MCT is a dynamic factor model estimated on monthly data for the seventeen major sectors of the PCE price index. It decomposes each sector’s inflation as the sum of a common trend, a sector-specific trend, a common transitory shock, and a sector-specific transitory shock. The trend in PCE inflation is constructed as the sum of the common and the sector-specific trends weighted by the expenditure shares.
March 1, 2023
The Dollar’s Imperial Circle
The importance of the U.S. dollar in the context of the international monetary system has been examined and studied extensively. In this post, we argue that the dollar is not only the dominant global currency but also a key variable affecting global economic conditions. We describe the mechanism through which the dollar acts as a procyclical force, generating what we dub the “Dollar’s Imperial Circle,” where swings in the dollar govern global macro developments.
Posted at 7:00 am in International Economics, Macroeconomics, Monetary Policy, Supply Chain | Permalink
February 23, 2023
A Turning Point in Wage Growth?
The surge in wage growth experienced by the U.S. economy over the past two years is showing some tentative signs of moderation. In this post, we take a closer look at the underlying data by estimating a model designed to isolate the persistent component—or trend—of wage growth. Our central finding is that this trend may have peaked in early 2022, having experienced an earlier rise and subsequent moderation that were broad-based across sectors. We also find that wage growth seems to be moderating more slowly than the trend in services inflation.
February 15, 2023
What Is “Outlook‑at‑Risk?”
Editor’s note: Since this post was first published, the y-axis label in the last chart has been corrected. February 15, 9:30 a.m.
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has increased the target range for the federal funds rate by 4.50 percentage points since March 16, 2022. In tightening the stance of monetary policy, the FOMC balances the risk of inflation remaining persistently high if the economy continues to run “hot” against the risk of unemployment rising as the economy cools. In this post, we review a quantitative approach to measuring the evolution of risks to real GDP growth, the unemployment rate, and inflation that is inspired by our previous work on “Vulnerable Growth.” We find that, in February, downside risks to real GDP growth and upside risks to unemployment moderated slightly, and upside risks to inflation continued to decline.
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