196 posts on "Monetary Policy"
April 11, 2012
The European Growth Outlook and Its Risks
As Europe continued to struggle with its sovereign debt crisis during the past two years, significant concerns about the growth outlook for European Union members began to emerge in late 2011.
Posted at 7:00 am in Euro Area, Forecasting, International Economics, Monetary Policy | Permalink | Comments (2)
April 4, 2012
Corridors and Floors in Monetary Policy
As part of its prudent planning for future developments, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has discussed strategies for normalizing the conduct of monetary policy, when appropriate, as the economy strengthens.
March 30, 2012
Just Released: Chairman Bernanke Returns to His Academic Roots, Part 2
his week, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke completed his four-lecture series for undergraduate students at the George Washington School of Business in Washington, D.C.
March 23, 2012
Just Released: Chairman Bernanke Returns to His Academic Roots
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is back in the classroom this month to deliver a series of four lectures for undergraduate students at the George Washington School of Business in Washington, D.C.
Posted at 7:00 am in Central Bank, Education, Inflation, Monetary Policy, Recession | Permalink | Comments (2)
November 25, 2011
The Failure to Forecast the Great Recession
The economics profession has been appropriately criticized for its failure to forecast the large fall in U.S. house prices and its propagation first into an unprecedented financial crisis and subsequently into the Great Recession.
Posted at 6:00 pm in Forecasting, Macroeconomics, Monetary Policy, Recession, Unemployment | Permalink | Comments (30)
November 16, 2011
Why Is There a “Zero Lower Bound” on Interest Rates?
Economists often talk about nominal interest rates having a “zero lower bound,” meaning they should not be expected to fall below zero.
November 8, 2011
Just Released: Conference on Global Systemic Risk Explores Four Key Questions
The 2007-09 financial crisis spread to markets and institutions around the world, demonstrating why global systemic risk is a major concern in modern financial markets.
August 22, 2011
A Look at the Accuracy of Policy Expectations
Since the 1980s, the primary policy tool of the Federal Reserve has been the federal funds rate. Because expectations of the future path of the funds rate play a central role in the term structure of interest rates and thus the monetary transmission mechanism, it is important to know how accurate these expectations are in predicting the funds rate. In this post, we investigate this issue using a well-known survey of private sector forecasters. We find that forecasts tend to over-predict the funds rate in easing cycles and under-predict it in tightening cycles. In addition, while forecasts during tightening cycles have become more accurate over time, forecast accuracy during easing cycles has not improved.
July 27, 2011
Inflation Expectations and Behavior: Do Survey Respondents Act on Their Beliefs?
Surveys of consumers’ inflation expectations are now a key component of monetary policy. To date, however, little work has been done on 1) whether individual consumers act on their beliefs about future inflation, and 2) whether the inflation expectations elicited by these surveys are actually informative about the respondents’ beliefs. In this post, we report on a new study by Armantier, Bruine de Bruin, Topa, van der Klaauw, and Zafar (2010) that investigates these two issues by comparing consumers’ survey-based inflation expectations with their behavior in a financially incentivized experiment. We find that the decisions of survey respondents are generally consistent with their stated inflation beliefs.
July 1, 2011
Just Released: Marking the End of LSAP 2
Yesterday, the Federal Reserve concluded its second Large-Scale Asset Purchase (LSAP) program. Liberty Street Economics is marking the end of the program—through which the Fed purchased $600 billion in Treasury securities—by providing a variety of resources (research, directives, and other information) on LSAP 2.
Posted at 10:00 am in Monetary Policy | Permalink
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