322 posts on "Liberty Street Economics"
April 10, 2023
The 2022 Spike in Corporate Security Settlement Fails
Settlement fails in corporate securities increased sharply in 2022, reaching levels not seen since the 2007-09 financial crisis. As a fraction of trading volume, fails that involve primary dealers reached an all-time high in the week of March 23, 2022. In this post, we investigate the 2022 spike in settlement fails for corporate securities and discuss potential drivers for this increase, including trading volume, corporate issuance, fails in bond ETFs, and operational problems.
Posted at 7:00 am in Financial Markets | Permalink
April 7, 2023
How Do Interest Rates (and Depositors) Impact Measures of Bank Value?
The rapid rise in interest rates across the yield curve has increased the broader public’s interest in the exposure embedded in bank balance sheets and in depositor behavior more generally. In this post, we consider a simple illustration of the potential impact of higher interest rates on measures of bank franchise value.
Posted at 10:00 am in Bank Capital, Banks, Financial Institutions, Financial Intermediation | Permalink | Comments (1)
What’s New with Corporate Leverage?
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) started increasing rates on March 16, 2022, and after the January 31–February 1, 2023, FOMC meeting, the lower bound of the target range of the federal funds rate had reached 4.50 percent, a level last registered in November 2007. Such a rapid rates increase could pass through to higher funding costs for U.S. corporations. In this post, we examine how corporate leverage and bond market debt have evolved over the course of the current tightening cycle and compare the current experience to that during the previous three tightening cycles.
April 6, 2023
MCT Update: Inflation Persistence Declined Modestly in February
This post presents an updated estimate of inflation persistence, following the release of personal consumption expenditure (PCE) price data for February 2023. The estimates are obtained by the Multivariate Core Trend (MCT), a model we introduced on Liberty Street Economics last year and covered most recently in a February post. The MCT is a dynamic factor model estimated on monthly data for the seventeen major sectors of the PCE price index. It decomposes each sector’s inflation as the sum of a common trend, a sector-specific trend, a common transitory shock, and a sector-specific transitory shock. The trend in PCE inflation is constructed as the sum of the common and the sector-specific trends weighted by the expenditure shares.
April 3, 2023
Monetary Policy Transmission and the Size of the Money Market Fund Industry: An Update
The size of the money market fund (MMF) industry co-moves with the monetary policy cycle. In a post published in 2019, we showed that this co-movement is likely due to the stronger response of MMF yields to monetary policy tightening relative to bank deposit rates, combined with MMF shares and bank deposits being close substitutes from an investor’s perspective. In this post, we update the analysis and zoom in to the current monetary policy tightening by the Federal Reserve.
Posted at 7:00 am in Federal Reserve, Financial Intermediation, Financial Markets, Monetary Policy | Permalink
March 30, 2023
What Has Driven the Labor Force Participation Gap since February 2020?
The U.S. labor force participation rate (LFPR) currently stands at 62.5 percent, 0.8 percentage point below its level in February 2020. This “participation gap” translates into 2.1 million workers out of the labor force. In this post, we evaluate three potential drivers of the gap: First, population aging from the baby boomers reaching retirement age puts downward pressure on participation. Second, the share of individuals of retirement age that are actually retired has risen since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, long COVID and disability more generally may induce more people to leave the labor force. We find that nearly all of the participation gap can be explained by population aging, which caused a significant rise in the number of retirements. Higher retirement rates compared to pre-COVID have had only a modest effect, while disability has virtually no effect.
Posted at 7:00 am in Demographics, Employment, Labor Market, Unemployment | Permalink | Comments (10)
March 24, 2023
The New York Fed DSGE Model Forecast—March 2023
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 December 2022. Note that this forecast was produced on February 27, and hence should be viewed as reflecting the state of the economy before the current banking sector turmoil.
March 10, 2023
Is Your Apartment Breaking because Your Landlord Is Broke?
Thirty-one percent of housing units in the United States are rental units, and rental housing is unique because unlike in the case of homeownership, renters rely on the property owner for maintenance spending. From the property owner’s perspective, building maintenance is an important investment necessary to keep the asset in good condition. However, like all investments, it is only possible to maintain a building with sufficient financial resources. In a recent staff report, I examine the relationship between a building’s financing constraints and its maintenance. I find that financially constrained buildings, colloquially “broke,” tend to be less well maintained.
March 9, 2023
Inflation Persistence: Dissecting the News in January PCE Data
This post presents updated estimates of inflation persistence, following the release of personal consumption expenditure (PCE) price data for January 2023. The estimates are obtained by the Multivariate Core Trend (MCT), a model we introduced on Liberty Street Economics last year and covered most recently here and here. The MCT is a dynamic factor model estimated on monthly data for the seventeen major sectors of the PCE price index. It decomposes each sector’s inflation as the sum of a common trend, a sector-specific trend, a common transitory shock, and a sector-specific transitory shock. The trend in PCE inflation is constructed as the sum of the common and the sector-specific trends weighted by the expenditure shares.
March 6, 2023
Insights from Newly Digitized Banking Data, 1867‑1904
Call reports—regulatory filings in which commercial banks report their assets, liabilities, income, and other information—are one of the most-used data sources in banking and finance. Though call reports were collected as far back as 1867, the underlying data are only easily accessible for the recent past: the mid-1980s onward in the case of the FDIC’s FFIEC call reports. To help researchers look farther back in time, we’ve begun creating a complete digital record of this “missing” call report data; this data release covers 1867 through 1904, the bulk of the National Banking Era. Here, we describe the digitization process and highlight some of the interesting features of that era from a research perspective.
RSS Feed
Follow Liberty Street Economics
