Liberty Street Economics

Liberty Street Economics

January 10, 2024

An Overlooked Factor in Banks’ Lending to Minorities

Matteo Crosignani and Hanh Le

Illustration: Economic Inequality - Credit Access: What affects lending disparities? gold background with ill of a bank building and four people of different races. arrows showing a circular motion between them.

In the second quarter of 2022, the homeownership rate for white households was 75 percent, compared to 45 percent for Black households and 48 percent for Hispanic households. One reason for these differences, virtually unchanged in the last few decades, is uneven access to credit. Studies have documented that minorities are more likely to be denied credit, pay higher rates, be charged higher fees, and face longer turnaround times compared to similar non-minority borrowers. In this post, which is based on a related Staff Report, we show that banks vary substantially in their lending to minorities, and we document an overlooked factor in this difference—the inequality aversion of banks’ stakeholders.

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Posted at 7:00 am in Banks, Housing, Inequality | Permalink
January 8, 2024

Measuring Price Inflation and Growth in Economic Well‑Being with Income‑Dependent Preferences

Danial Lashkari

Photo: Young minority family unloading groceries from car

How can we accurately measure changes in living standards over time in the presence of price inflation? In this post, I discuss a novel and simple methodology that uses the cross-sectional relationship between income and household-level inflation to construct accurate measures of changes in living standards that account for the dependence of consumption preferences on income. Applying this method to data from the U.S. suggests potentially substantial mismeasurements in our available proxies of average growth in consumer welfare in the U.S.

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Posted at 7:00 am in Inequality, Inflation, Macroeconomics | Permalink | Comments (1)
December 21, 2023

Where Is R‑Star and the End of the Refi Boom: The Top 5 Posts of 2023

Anna Snider

The Top 5 Posts of 2023 Graphic

The topics covered on Liberty Street Economics in 2023 hit many themes, reflecting the range of research interests of the more than sixty staff economists at the New York Fed and their coauthors. We published 122 posts this year, exploring important subjects such as equitable growth and the economic impacts of extreme weather, alongside our deep and long-standing coverage of topics like inflation, banking system vulnerability, international economics, and monetary policy effects. As we close out the year, we’re taking a look back at the top five posts. See you again in 2024.

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Posted at 7:00 am in Banks, Household Finance, Treasury | Permalink
December 20, 2023

Does Trade Uncertainty Affect Bank Lending?

Ricardo Correa, Julian di Giovanni, Linda S. Goldberg, and Camelia Minoiu

two cargo ships loaded with shipping containers on a calm sea.

The recent era of global trade expansion is over. Faced with increased geopolitical risk, fragile foreign supply chains, and uncertainties in the international trade environment, firms are postponing entry into foreign markets and pulling back from foreign activities (IMF 2023). Besides its direct effects on real activity, the recent rise in trade uncertainty has potentially important implications for the financial sector. This post describes how the lending activities of U.S. banks were affected by the rise in trade uncertainty during the 2018-19 “trade war.” In particular, banks that were more exposed to trade uncertainty contracted lending to all of their domestic nonfinancial business borrowers, regardless of whether these borrowers were facing high or low uncertainty themselves. Furthermore, banks’ lending strategies exhibited the type of “wait-and-see” behavior usually found in corporate firms facing investment decisions under uncertainty, and the lending contraction was larger for those banks that were more financially constrained.

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Posted at 9:00 am in Banks, International Economics | Permalink
December 19, 2023

Dropping Like a Stone: ON RRP Take‑up in the Second Half of 2023

Gara Afonso, Marco Cipriani, and Gabriele La Spada

Decorative photo of tall buildings with bank sign and spreadsheet overlay.

Take-up at the Overnight Reverse Repo Facility (ON RRP) has halved over the past six months, declining by more than $1 trillion since June 2023. This steady decrease follows a rapid increase from close to zero in early 2021 to $2.2 trillion in December 2022, and a period of relatively stable balances during the first half of 2023. In this post, we interpret the recent drop in ON RRP take-up through the lens of the channels that we identify in our recent Staff Report as driving its initial increase.

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Posted at 7:00 am in Fed Funds, Federal Reserve, Monetary Policy, Repo | Permalink
December 18, 2023

Hey, Economist! Outgoing Advisor Antoine Martin Reflects on How His New York Fed Perch Has Shaped His Work

An Interview with Antoine Martin

Portrait of Antoine Martin

Antoine Martin, an economist and financial stability advisor in the New York Fed’s Research and Statistics Group, will soon take up a new post at the Swiss National Bank (SNB), as head of its third department covering money markets/foreign exchange (FX). In that role, Martin, who is originally from Switzerland, also becomes one of three members of that central bank’s rate-setting governing board. Readers of Liberty Street Economics will be familiar with his byline, as he has written more than sixty posts presenting new research findings and policy analysis, all with an eye for breaking down the most complicated topics in clear terms. He took a few questions from publications editor Anna Snider about his experiences and future plans as he prepares to move on.

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Posted at 7:00 am in Central Bank, Federal Reserve, Hey, Economist! | Permalink
December 15, 2023

The New York Fed DSGE Model Forecast—December 2023

Marco Del Negro, Pranay Gundam, Donggyu Lee, Ramya Nallamotu, and Brian Pacula

decorative illustration: chart and stock prices background.

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 September 2023. As usual, we wish to remind our readers that the DSGE model forecast is not an official New York Fed forecast, but only an input to the Research staff’s overall forecasting process. For more information about the model and variables discussed here, see our DSGE model Q & A.

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Posted at 9:00 am in DSGE, Forecasting, Macroeconomics | Permalink
December 1, 2023

Recent Disparities in Earnings and Employment

Rajashri Chakrabarti, Kasey Chatterji-Len, Dan Garcia, and Maxim Pinkovskiy

Dectorative image of collage of polaroids of diverse group of people portraits.

The New York Fed recently released its latest set of Equitable Growth Indicators (EGIs). Updated quarterly, the EGIs continue to report demographic and geographic differences in inflation, earnings (real and nominal), employment, and consumer spending (real and nominal) at the national level. This release also launches a set of national wealth EGIs (which will be examined more closely on Liberty Street Economics early next year). Going forward, EGI releases will also include a set of regional EGIs, which will present disparities in inflation, earnings (real and nominal), employment, and consumer spending (real and nominal) in our region. Drawing on the just released EGIs, in this post, we present recent gender gaps in the labor market at the national and regional levels. We provide a picture of how gender wage and employment disparities have evolved since the pandemic, examining and contrasting gaps at the national and regional level. We find that the gaps between the employment rates and earnings of men and women have declined steadily following the pandemic, but have declined perceptibly more so in our region than in the nation.

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Posted at 7:00 am in Demographics, Inequality, New Jersey, New York, Regional Analysis, Unemployment | Permalink
November 30, 2023

FHA First‑Time Buyer Homeownership Sustainability: An Update

Donghoon Lee and Joseph Tracy

Young African American heterosexual couple sitting on the steps of a house with front door open and cardboard moving boxes around them.

An important part of the mission of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) is to provide affordable mortgages that both promote the transition from renting to owning and create “sustainable” homeownership. The FHA has never defined what it means by sustainability.  However, we developed a scorecard in 2018 that tracks the long-term outcomes of FHA first-time buyers (FTBs) and update it again in this post. The data show that from 2011 to 2016 roughly
21.8 percent of FHA FTBs failed to sustain their homeownership.

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Posted at 7:00 am in Equitable Growth, Household Finance, Housing | Permalink
November 29, 2023

Treasury Bill Supply and ON RRP Investment

Gara Afonso, Marco Cipriani, Catherine Huang, Gabriele La Spada, and Sergio Olivas

Decorative photo: close up of the words "The Treasury" on the treasury building showing the top of the columns outside the structure.

Take-up at the Federal Reserve’s Overnight Reverse Repo Facility (ON RRP) increased from a few billion dollars in January 2021 to around $2.6 trillion at the end of December 2022.  In this post, based on a recent Staff Report, we explain how the supply of U.S. Treasury bills (T-bills) affects the decision of money market mutual funds (MMFs) to invest at the facility. We show that MMFs responded to a reduction in T-bill supply by increasing their take-up at the ON RRP, helping to explain the increased overall take-up.

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Posted at 7:00 am in Financial Markets | Permalink
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Liberty 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.

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