Liberty Street Economics

September 28, 2022

Short‑Dated Term Premia and the Level of Inflation

Richard Crump, Charles Smith, and Peter Van Tassel

Since the advent of derivatives trading on short-term interest rates in the 1980s, financial commentators have often interpreted market prices as directly reflecting the expected path of future interest rates. However, market prices generally embed risk premia (or “term premia” in reference to measures of risk premia over different horizons) reflecting the compensation required to bear the risk of the asset. When term premia are large in magnitude, derivatives prices may differ substantially from investor expectations of future rates. In this post, we assess whether term premia have increased with the recent rise in inflation, given the historically positive relationship between the two series, and what this means for the interpretation of derivatives prices.

Posted at 7:00 am in Financial Markets, Inflation, Monetary Policy | Permalink

September 27, 2022

Revisiting Federal Student Loan Forgiveness: An Update Based on the White House Plan

Jacob Goss, Daniel Mangrum, and Joelle Scally

On August 24, 2022, the White House released a plan to cancel federal student loans for most borrowers. In April, we wrote about the costs and who most benefits from a few hypothetical loan forgiveness proposals using our Consumer Credit Panel, based on Equifax credit report data. In this post, we update our framework to consider the White House plan now that parameters are known, with estimates for the total amount of forgiven loans and the distribution of who holds federal student loans before and after the proposed debt jubilee.

Posted at 7:00 am in Demographics, Education, Household Finance, Inequality, Student Loans | Permalink | Comments (2)

September 26, 2022

Is China Running Out of Policy Space to Navigate Future Economic Challenges?

Hunter Clark and Jeff Dawson

Photo: Chinese shoppers lining up to buy shopping carts full of items within a store

After making progress slowing the pace of debt accumulation prior to the pandemic, China saw its debt levels surge in 2020 as the government responded to the severe economic slowdown with credit-led stimulus. With China currently in the midst of another sharp decline in economic activity due to its property slump and zero-COVID strategy, Chinese authorities have responded again by pushing out credit to soften the downturn despite already high levels of debt on corporate, household, and government balance sheets. In this post, we revisit China’s debt buildup and consider the growing constraints on Chinese policymakers’ tools to navigate future economic challenges.

Posted at 7:00 am in Credit, International Economics | Permalink

September 23, 2022

The New York Fed DSGE Model Forecast—September 2022

Marco Del Negro, Keshav Dogra, Aidan Gleich, Donggyu Lee, Ramya Nallamotu, and Sikata Sengupta

Photo: decorative; numbers with line chart on top

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 June 2022.

Posted at 9:00 am in DSGE, Forecasting, Inflation, Macroeconomics | Permalink

September 8, 2022

How Can Safe Asset Markets Be Fragile?

Thomas Eisenbach and Gregory Phelan

Photo: carton on eggs with one egg cracked

The market for U.S. Treasury securities experienced extreme stress in March 2020, when prices dropped precipitously (yields spiked) over a period of about two weeks. This was highly unusual, as Treasury prices typically increase during times of stress. Using a theoretical model, we show that markets for safe assets can be fragile due to strategic interactions among investors who hold Treasury securities for their liquidity characteristics. Worried about having to sell at potentially worse prices in the future, such investors may sell preemptively, leading to self-fulfilling “market runs” that are similar to traditional bank runs in some respects.

Posted at 7:00 am in Federal Reserve, Financial Markets, Liquidity, Treasury | Permalink

September 6, 2022

Small Business Recovery after Natural Disasters

Martin Hiti, Claire Kramer Mills, and Asani Sarkar

The first post of this series found that small businesses owned by people of color are particularly vulnerable to natural disasters. In this post, we focus on the aftermath of disasters, and examine disparities in the ability of firms to reopen their businesses and access disaster relief. Our results indicate that Black-owned firms are more likely to remain closed for longer periods and face greater difficulties in obtaining the immediate relief needed to cope with a natural disaster.

Posted at 7:02 am in Climate Change, Credit, Inequality | Permalink

How Do Natural Disasters Affect U.S. Small Business Owners?

Martin Hiti, Claire Kramer Mills, and Asani Sarkar

Recent research has linked climate change and socioeconomic inequality (see here, here, and here). But what are the effects of climate change on small businesses, particularly those owned by people of color, which tend to be more resource-constrained and less resilient? In a series of two posts, we use the Federal Reserve’s Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS) to document small businesses’ experiences with natural disasters and how these experiences differ based on the race and ethnicity of business owners. This first post shows that small firms owned by people of color sustain losses from natural disasters at a disproportionately higher rate than other small businesses, and that these losses make up a larger portion of their total revenues. In the second post, we explore the ability of small firms to reopen and to obtain disaster relief funding in the aftermath of climate events.

Posted at 7:00 am in Climate Change, Credit, Inequality | Permalink

August 24, 2022

How Much Did Supply Constraints Boost U.S. Inflation?

Julian di Giovanni

Photo: Man with COVID mask picking one of the last of the breads in the grocery aisle

What factors are behind the recent inflation surge has been a huge topic of debate amongst academics and policymakers. We know that pandemic-related supply constraints such as labor shortages and supply chain bottlenecks have been key factors pushing inflation higher. These bottlenecks started with the pandemic (lockdowns, sick workers) and were made worse by the push arising from increased demand caused by very expansionary fiscal and monetary policy. Our analysis of the relative importance of supply-side versus demand-side factors finds 60 percent of U.S. inflation over the 2019-21 period was due to the jump in demand for goods while 40 percent owed to supply-side issues that magnified the impact of this higher demand.

Posted at 7:00 am in Fiscal Policy, Inflation, Macroeconomics, Monetary Policy, Supply Chain | Permalink | Comments (3)

August 23, 2022

Pass‑Through of Wages and Import Prices Has Increased in the Post‑COVID Period

Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise, Fatih Karahan, and Ayşegül Şahin

Photo: asian businesswoman holding a digital tablet working at a warehouse

Annual CPI inflation reached 9.1 percent in June 2022, the highest reading since November 1981. The broad-based nature of the recent inflation readings has increased concerns that inflation may run above the Federal Reserve’s target for a longer period than anticipated. In this post we use detailed industry-level data to examine two prominent cost-push-based explanations for high inflation: rising import prices and higher labor costs. We find that the pass-through of wages and input prices to the U.S. Producer Price Index has grown during the pandemic. Both the large changes in these costs and a higher pass-through into domestic prices have contributed toward higher inflation.

Posted at 7:00 am in Inflation, International Economics, Pandemic | Permalink

August 18, 2022

Remote Work Is Sticking

Jaison R. Abel, Jason Bram, and Richard Deitz

photo decorative: Businessman checking emails while on a video call from his home office

When the pandemic hit in early 2020, many businesses quickly and significantly expanded opportunities for their employees to work from home, resulting in a large increase in the share of work being done remotely. Now, more than two years later, how much work is being done from home? In this post, we update our analysis from last year on the extent of remote work in the region. As has been found by others, we find that some of the increase in remote work that began early in the pandemic is sticking. According to firms responding to our August regional business surveys, about 20 percent of all service work and 7 percent of manufacturing work is now being conducted remotely, well above shares before the pandemic, and firms expect little change in these shares a year from now. While responses were mixed, slightly more firms indicated that remote working had reduced rather than increased productivity. Interestingly, however, the rise in remote work has not led to widespread reductions in the amount of workspace being utilized by businesses in the region.

Posted at 7:00 am in Labor Market, Pandemic, Regional Analysis | Permalink | Comments (1)

Markets & Policy Implementation

Liberty Street Economics

Short‑Dated Term Premia and the Level of Inflation

Revisiting Federal Student Loan Forgiveness: An Update Based on the White House Plan

Is China Running Out of Policy Space to Navigate Future Economic Challenges?

The New York Fed DSGE Model Forecast—September 2022

How Can Safe Asset Markets Be Fragile?

Small Business Recovery after Natural Disasters

How Do Natural Disasters Affect U.S. Small Business Owners?

How Much Did Supply Constraints Boost U.S. Inflation?

Pass‑Through of Wages and Import Prices Has Increased in the Post‑COVID Period

Remote Work Is Sticking

Economic Inequality

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