384 posts on "Liberty Street Economics"
August 14, 2023
The Federal Reserve’s Two Key Rates: Similar but Not the Same?
Since the global financial crisis, the Federal Reserve has relied on two main rates to implement monetary policy—the rate paid on reserve balances (IORB rate) and the rate offered at the overnight reverse repo facility (ON RRP rate). In this post, we explore how these tools steer the federal funds rate within the Federal Reserve’s target range and how effective they have been at supporting rate control.
August 10, 2023
The Evolution of Short‑Run r* after the Pandemic
This post discusses the evolution of the short-run natural rate of interest, or short-run r*, over the past year and a half according to the New York Fed DSGE model, and the implications of this evolution for inflation and output projections. We show that, from the model’s perspective, short-run r* has increased notably over the past year, to some extent outpacing the large increase in the policy rate. One implication of these findings is that the drag on the economy from recent monetary policy tightening may have been limited, rationalizing why economic conditions have remained relatively buoyant so far despite the elevated level of interest rates.
August 9, 2023
The Post‑Pandemic r*
The debate about the natural rate of interest, or r*, sometimes overlooks the point that there is an entire term structure of r* measures, with short-run estimates capturing current economic conditions and long-run estimates capturing more secular factors. The whole term structure of r* matters for policy: shorter run measures are relevant for gauging how restrictive or expansionary current policy is, while longer run measures are relevant when assessing terminal rates. This two-post series covers the evolution of both in the aftermath of the pandemic, with today’s post focusing especially on long-run measures and tomorrow’s post on short-run r*.
August 8, 2023
Credit Card Markets Head Back to Normal after Pandemic Pause
Total household debt balances increased by $16 billion in the second quarter of 2023, according to the latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit from the New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data. This reflects a modest rise from the first quarter. Credit card balances saw the largest increase of all debt types—$45 billion—and now stand at $1.03 trillion, surpassing $1 trillion in nominal terms for the first time in the series history. After a sharp contraction in the first year of the pandemic, credit card balances have seen seven quarters of year-over-year growth. The second quarter of 2023 saw a brisk 16.2 percent increase from the previous year, continuing this strong trend. With credit card balances at historic highs, we consider how lending and repayment have evolved using the New York Fed’s Consumer Credit Panel (CCP), which is based on anonymized Equifax credit report data.
August 2, 2023
Why Do Forecasters Disagree about Their Monetary Policy Expectations?
While forecasters generally disagree about the expected path of monetary policy, the level of disagreement as measured in the New York Fed’s Survey of Primary Dealers (SPD) has increased substantially since 2022. For instance, the dispersion of expectations about the future path of the target federal funds rate (FFR) has widened significantly. What explains the current elevated disagreement in FFR forecasts?
July 13, 2023
Inflating Away the Debt: The Debt‑Inflation Channel of German Hyperinflation
The recent rise in price pressures around the world has reignited interest in understanding how inflation transmits to the real economy. Economists have long recognized that unexpected surges of inflation can redistribute wealth from creditors to debtors when debt contracts are written in nominal terms (see, for example, Fisher 1933). If debtors are financially constrained, this redistribution can affect real economic activity by relaxing financing constraints. This mechanism, which we call the debt-inflation channel, is well understood theoretically (for example, Gomes, Jermann, and Schmid 2016), but there is limited empirical evidence to substantiate it. In this post, we discuss new insights from one of the key events in monetary history: the Great German Inflation of 1919-23. Because this case of inflation was both surprising and extremely high, Germany’s experience helps shed light on how high inflation impacts firms’ economic activity through the erosion of their nominal debt burdens. These insights are based on a recently released research paper.
July 12, 2023
Runs on Stablecoins
Stablecoins are digital assets whose value is pegged to that of fiat currencies, usually the U.S. dollar, with a typical exchange rate of one dollar per unit. Their market capitalization has grown exponentially over the last couple of years, from $5 billion in 2019 to around $180 billion in 2022. Notwithstanding their name, however, stablecoins can be very unstable: between May 1 and May 16, 2022, there was a run on stablecoins, with their circulation decreasing by 15.58 billion and their market capitalization dropping by $25.63 billion (see charts below.) In this post, we describe the different types of stablecoins and how they keep their peg, compare them with money market funds—a similar but much older and more regulated financial product, and discuss the stablecoin run of May 2022.
July 10, 2023
How Exposed Are U.S. Banks’ Loan Portfolios to Climate Transition Risks?
Much of the work on climate risk has focused on the physical effects of climate change, with less attention devoted to “transition risks” related to negative economic effects of enacting climate-related policies and phasing out high-emitting technologies. Further, most of the work in this area has measured transition risks using backward-looking metrics, such as carbon emissions, which does not allow us to compare how different policy options will affect the economy. In a recent Staff Report, we capitalize on a new measure to study the extent to which banks’ loan portfolios are exposed to specific climate transition policies. The results show that while banks’ exposures are meaningful, they are manageable.
July 6, 2023
Where Is Inflation Persistence Coming From?
Elevated inflation continues to be a top-of-mind preoccupation for households, businesses, and policymakers. Why has the post-pandemic inflation proved so persistent? In a Liberty Street Economics post early in 2022, we introduced a measure designed to dissect the buildup of the inflationary pressures that emerged in mid-2021 and to understand where the sources of its persistence are. This measure, that we labeled Multivariate Core Trend (MCT) inflation analyzes whether inflation is short-lived or persistent, and whether it is concentrated in particular economic sectors or broad-based.
The EGIs: Analyzing the Economy Through an Equitable Growth Lens
Inflation remains elevated, labor markets are close to the strongest they have been, real consumption is up year-over year, but all of these observations are with respect to averages. Behind these macroeconomic trends can be widely varying experiences across different demographic and socioeconomic groups that make up our society. To provide researchers, practitioners, and the public with timely, regularly updated and comprehensive answers to these questions, we launched the Equitable Growth Indicators (EGIs)—a new tool to help foster the evolving discussion about economic inequality and equitable growth. To illustrate the utility of the EGIs, we provide examples of some striking differences in trends captured in the May release of the EGIs on inflation, real earnings, and real spending. More heterogeneity analysis and data are available at nyfed.org/egi.
RSS Feed
Follow Liberty Street Economics
