47 posts on "Recession"
May 8, 2024
How Are They Now? A Checkup on Homeowners Who Experienced Foreclosure
The end of the Great Recession marked the beginning of the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. The Great Recession, with its dramatic housing bust, led to a wave of home foreclosures as overleveraged borrowers found themselves unable to meet their payment obligations. In early 2009, the New York Fed’s Research Group launched the Consumer Credit Panel (CCP), a foundational data set of the Center for Microeconomic Data, to monitor the financial health of Americans as the economy recovered. The CCP, which is based on anonymized credit report data from Equifax, gives us an opportunity to track individuals during the period leading to the foreclosure, observe when a flag is added to their credit report and then—years later—removed. Here, we examine the longer-term impact of a foreclosure on borrowers’ credit scores and borrowing experiences: do they return to borrowing, or shy away from credit use and homeownership after their earlier bad experience?
May 7, 2024
Many Places Still Have Not Recovered from the Pandemic Recession
More than four years have passed since the onset of the pandemic, which resulted in one of the sharpest and deepest economic downturns in U.S. history. While the nation as a whole has recovered the jobs that were lost during the pandemic recession, many places have not. Indeed, job shortfalls remain in more than a quarter of the country’s metro areas, including many in the New York-Northern New Jersey region. In fact, while employment is well above pre-pandemic levels in Northern New Jersey, jobs have only recently recovered in and around New York City, and most of upstate New York—like much of the Rust Belt—still has not fully recovered and has some of the largest job shortfalls in the country.
Posted at 11:00 am in Labor Market, New Jersey, New York, Pandemic, Recession, Regional Analysis | Permalink | Comments (1)
December 17, 2021
The Region Is Struggling to Recover from the Pandemic Recession
The pandemic struck the New York-Northern New Jersey region early and hard, and the economy is still struggling to recover nearly two years later. Indeed, employment fell by 20 percent in New York City as the pandemic took hold, a significantly sharper decline than for the nation as a whole, and the rest of the region wasn’t far behind, creating a much larger hole to dig out of than other parts of the country. While the region saw significant growth as the economy began to heal, growth has slowed noticeably, and job shortfalls—that is, the amount by which employment remains below pre-pandemic levels—are some of the largest in the nation. Among major metro areas, job shortfalls in New York City, Buffalo, and Syracuse rank among the five worst in the country. Thus, despite much progress, the region is struggling to recover from the pandemic recession. By contrast, employment has rebounded above pre-pandemic levels in Puerto Rico, reaching a five-year high.
Posted at 11:00 am in Labor Market, New Jersey, New York, Pandemic, Recession, Unemployment | Permalink
October 15, 2021
At the New York Fed: Implications of Federal Reserve Actions in Response to the COVID‑19 Pandemic
On September 30 and October 1, 2021, the New York Fed held a virtual conference on the implications of the Fed’s actions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. New York Fed President John Williams gave the opening and concluding remarks.
Posted at 12:00 pm in COVID-19 Facilities, Crisis, Federal Reserve, Monetary Policy, Recession | Permalink
September 27, 2021
The Spillover Effects of COVID‑19 on Productivity throughout the Supply Chain
While the shocks from COVID-19 were concentrated in a handful of contact-intensive industries, they had rippling effects throughout the economy, which culminated in a considerable decline in U.S. GDP. In this post, we estimate how much of the fall in U.S. GDP during the pandemic was driven by spillover effects from the productivity losses of contact-intensive industries.
May 19, 2021
Keeping Borrowers Current in a Pandemic
Federal government actions in response to the pandemic have taken many forms. One set of policies is intended to reduce the risk that the pandemic will result in a housing market crash and a wave of foreclosures like the one that accompanied the Great Financial Crisis. An important and novel tool employed as part of these policies is mortgage forbearance, which provides borrowers the option to pause or reduce debt service payments during periods of hardship, without marking the loan delinquent on the borrower’s credit report. Widespread take-up of forbearance over the past year has significantly changed the housing finance system in the United States, in different ways for different borrowers. This post is the first of four focusing attention on the effects of mortgage forbearance and the outlook for the mortgage market. Here we use data from the New York Fed’s Consumer Credit Panel (CCP) to examine the effects of these changes on households during the pandemic.
May 3, 2021
Endogenous Supply Chains, Productivity, and COVID‑19
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many industries adapted to new social distancing guidelines by adopting new technologies, providing protective equipment for their employees, and digitizing their methods of production. These changes in industries’ supply chains, together with monetary and fiscal stimulus, contributed to dampening the economic impact of COVID-19 over time. In this post, I discuss a new framework that analyzes how changes in supply chains can drive economic growth in the long run and mitigate recessions in the short run.
February 17, 2021
Mortgage Rates Decline and (Prime) Households Take Advantage
Today, the New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data reported that household debt balances increased by $206 billion in the fourth quarter of 2020, marking a $414 billion increase since the end of 2019. But the COVID pandemic and ensuing recession have marked an end to the dynamics in household borrowing that have characterized the expansion since the Great Recession, which included robust growth in auto and student loans, while mortgage and credit card balances grew more slowly. As the pandemic took hold, these dynamics were altered. One shift in 2020 was a larger bump up in mortgage balances. Mortgage balances grew by $182 billion, the biggest uptick since 2006, boosted by historically high volumes of originations. Here, we take a close look at the composition of mortgage originations, which neared $1.2 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2020, the highest single-quarter volume seen since our series begins in 2000. The Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit and this analysis are based on the New York Fed’s Consumer Credit Panel, which is itself based on anonymized Equifax credit data.
Posted at 11:00 am in Credit, Household Finance, Housing, Pandemic, Recession, Student Loans | Permalink
February 9, 2021
Black and White Differences in the Labor Market Recovery from COVID‑19
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the various measures put in place to contain it caused a rapid deterioration in labor market conditions for many workers and plunged the nation into recession. The unemployment rate increased dramatically during the COVID recession, rising from 3.5 percent in February to 14.8 percent in April, accompanied by an almost three percentage point decline in labor force participation. While the subsequent labor market recovery in the aggregate has exceeded even some of the most optimistic scenarios put forth soon after this dramatic rise, this recovery has been markedly weaker for the Black population. In this post, we document several striking differences in labor market outcomes by race and use Current Population Survey (CPS) data to better understand them.
Posted at 11:00 am in Demographics, Equitable Growth, Human Capital, Inequality, Labor Market, Pandemic, Recession, Unemployment | Permalink
August 4, 2020
Tracking the COVID‑19 Economy with the Weekly Economic Index (WEI)
At the end of March, we launched the Weekly Economic Index (WEI) as a tool to monitor changes in real activity during the pandemic. The rapid deterioration in economic conditions made it important to assess developments as soon as possible, rather than waiting for monthly and quarterly data to be released. In this post, we describe how the WEI has measured the effects of COVID-19. So far in 2020, the WEI has synthesized daily and weekly data to measure GDP growth remarkably well. We document this performance, and we offer some guidance on evaluating the WEI’s forecasting abilities based on 2020 data and interpreting WEI updates and revisions.
Posted at 2:58 pm in Corporate Finance, Forecasting, Macroeconomics, Pandemic, Recession | Permalink
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