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Liberty Street Economics
154 posts on "Monetary Policy"July 07, 2020
A New Reserves Regime? COVID-19 and the Federal Reserve Balance Sheet
Aggregate reserves declined from nearly $3 trillion in August 2014 to $1.4 trillion in mid-September 2019, as the Federal Reserve normalized its balance sheet. This decline came to a halt in September 2019 when the Federal Reserve responded to turmoil in short-term money markets, with reserves fluctuating around $1.6 trillion in the early months of 2020. Then, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve dramatically expanded its balance sheet, both directly, through outright purchases and repurchase agreements, and indirectly, as a consequence of the facilities to support market functioning and the flow of credit to the real economy. In this post, we characterize the increase in reserves between March and June 2020, describing changes to the distribution and concentration of reserves.
Continue reading "A New Reserves Regime? COVID-19 and the Federal Reserve Balance Sheet" »
Posted by Blog Author at 7:00 AM in Fed Funds, Federal Reserve, Fiscal Policy, Liquidity, Monetary Policy, Pandemic | Permalink | Comments (0)June 22, 2020
Japan’s Experience with Yield Curve Control
In September 2016, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) changed its policy framework to target the yield on ten-year government bonds at “around zero percent,” close to the prevailing rate at the time. The new framework was announced as a modification of the Bank's earlier policy of rapid monetary base expansion via large-scale asset purchases—a policy that market participants increasingly regarded as unsustainable. While the BoJ announced that the rapid pace of government bond purchases would not change, it turned out that the yield target approach allowed for a dramatic scaling back in purchases. In Japan’s case, the commitment to purchase whatever was needed to keep the ten-year rate near zero has meant that very little in the way of asset purchases have been required.
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Posted by Blog Author at 7:00 AM in International Economics, Monetary Policy | Permalink | Comments (2)May 19, 2020
The Primary Dealer Credit Facility
This post is part of an ongoing series on the credit and liquidity facilities established by the Federal Reserve to support households and businesses during the COVID-19 outbreak.
On March 17, 2020, the Federal Reserve announced that it would re-establish the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) to allow primary dealers to support smooth market functioning and facilitate the availability of credit to businesses and households. The PDCF started offering overnight and term funding with maturities of up to ninety days on March 20. It will be in place for at least six months and may be extended as conditions warrant. In this post, we provide an overview of the PDCF and its usage to date.
Posted by Blog Author at 7:00 AM in Bank Capital, Banks, Central Bank, Credit, Federal Reserve, Liquidity, Monetary Policy, Pandemic, Systemic Risk | Permalink | Comments (0)May 13, 2020
Inflation Expectations in Times of COVID-19
As an important driver of the inflation process, inflation expectations must be monitored closely by policymakers to ensure they remain consistent with long-term monetary policy objectives. In particular, if inflation expectations start drifting away from the central bank’s objective, they could become permanently “un-anchored” in the long run. Because the COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis unlike any other, its impact on short- and medium-term inflation has been challenging to predict. In this post, we summarize the results of our forthcoming paper that makes use of the Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) to study how the COVID-19 outbreak has affected the public’s inflation expectations. We find that, so far, households’ inflation expectations have not exhibited a consistent upward or downward trend since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the data reveal unprecedented increases in individual uncertainty—and disagreement across respondents—about future inflation outcomes. Close monitoring of these measures is warranted because elevated levels may signal a risk of inflation expectations becoming unanchored.
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Posted by Blog Author at 7:00 AM in Expectations, Inflation, Monetary Policy, Pandemic | Permalink | Comments (0)May 08, 2020
The Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility
This post is part of an ongoing series on the credit and liquidity facilities established by the Federal Reserve to support households and businesses during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Over the first three weeks of March, as uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic increased, prime and municipal (muni) money market funds (MMFs) faced large redemption pressures. Similarly to past episodes of industry dislocation, such as the 2008 financial crisis and the 2011 European bank crisis, outflows from prime and muni MMFs were mirrored by large inflows into government MMFs, which have historically been seen by investors as a safe haven in times of crisis. In this post, we describe a liquidity facility established by the Federal Reserve in response to these outflows.
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Posted by Blog Author at 7:00 AM in Central Bank, Credit, Federal Reserve, Financial Institutions, Financial Intermediation, Financial Markets, Liquidity, Monetary Policy, Pandemic | Permalink | Comments (0)April 15, 2020
The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Fed’s Response
The Federal Reserve has taken unprecedented actions to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on U.S. households and businesses. These measures include cutting the Fed’s policy rate to the zero lower bound, purchasing Treasury and mortgage-backed securities (MBS) to promote market functioning, and establishing several liquidity and credit facilities. In this post, we briefly review the developments motivating these actions, summarize what the Fed has done and why, and compare the Fed’s response with its response to the 2007-09 financial crisis.
Continue reading "The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Fed’s Response" »
Posted by Blog Author at 4:11 PM in Crisis, Federal Reserve, FOMC, Great Recession, Monetary Policy, Pandemic | Permalink | Comments (0)April 10, 2020
Helping State and Local Governments Stay Liquid
This post is part of an ongoing series on the credit and liquidity facilities established by the Federal Reserve to support households and businesses during the COVID-19 outbreak.
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.
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Posted by Blog Author at 4:25 PM in Central Bank, Fiscal Policy, Monetary Policy, Pandemic | Permalink | Comments (0)February 24, 2020
Understanding Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian Models: Insights from a PRANK
In recent years there has been a lot of interest in the effect of income inequality (heterogeneity) on the economy, from both academics and policymakers. Researchers have developed Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) models that incorporate heterogeneity and uninsurable idiosyncratic risk into the New Keynesian models that have become a cornerstone of monetary policy analysis. This research has argued that heterogeneity and idiosyncratic risk change many features of New Keynesian models – the transmission of conventional monetary policy, the forward guidance puzzle, fiscal multipliers, the efficacy of targeted transfers and automatic stabilizers, among others. However, the source of the difference between HANK and representative agent New Keynesian (RANK) models remains unclear. This is because HANK models are typically not analytically tractable, leaving it unclear what exactly is driving the results. To shed light on the macroeconomic consequences of heterogeneity, we develop a stylized HANK model that contains key features present in more complicated HANK models.
Continue reading "Understanding Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian Models: Insights from a PRANK" »
Posted by Blog Author at 7:00 AM in Central Bank, Credit, Federal Reserve, Financial Institutions, Fiscal Policy, Inequality, Macroecon, Monetary Policy, Recession, Systemic Risk | Permalink | Comments (0)November 20, 2019
Monetary Policy Transmission and the Size of the Money Market Fund Industry
In a recent post, we documented the transmission of monetary policy through money market funds (MMFs). In this post, we complement that analysis by comparing the transmission of monetary policy via MMFs to the transmission via bank deposits and studying the impact of the differential pass-through on the size of the MMF industry. To this purpose, we focus on rates on certificates of deposit (CDs) offered to banks’ retail customers and compare their response to monetary policy with that of retail MMF yields.
Continue reading "Monetary Policy Transmission and the Size of the Money Market Fund Industry" »
Posted by Blog Author at 7:00 AM in Federal Reserve, Financial Institutions, Financial Intermediation, Monetary Policy | Permalink | Comments (4)September 04, 2019
The Transmission of Monetary Policy and the Sophistication of Money Market Fund Investors
In December 2015, the Federal Reserve tightened monetary policy for the first time in almost ten years and, over the following three years, it raised interest rates eight more times, increasing the target range for the federal funds rate from 0-25 basis points (bps) to 225-250 bps. To what extent are changes in the fed funds rate transmitted to cash investors, and are there differences in the pass-through between retail and institutional investors? In this post, we describe the impact of recent rate increases on the yield paid by money market funds (MMFs) to their investors and show that the impact varies depending on investors’ sophistication.
Posted by Blog Author at 7:00 AM in Federal Reserve, Financial Institutions, Financial Intermediation, Monetary Policy | Permalink | Comments (3)About the BlogLiberty 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.
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