106 posts on "pandemic"
May 26, 2022
What Do Consumers Think Will Happen to Inflation?
This post provides an update on two earlier blog posts (here and here) in which we discuss how consumers’ views about future inflation have evolved in a continually changing economic environment. Using data from the New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE), we show that while short-term inflation expectations have continued to trend upward, medium-term inflation expectations appear to have reached a plateau over the past few months, and longer-term inflation expectations have remained remarkably stable. Not surprisingly given recent movements in consumer prices, we find that most respondents agree that inflation will remain high over the next year. In contrast, and somewhat surprisingly, there is a divergence in consumers’ medium-term inflation expectations, in the sense that we observe a simultaneous increase in both the share of respondents who expect high inflation and the share of respondents who expect low inflation (and even deflation) three years from now. Finally, we show that individual consumers have become more uncertain about what inflation will be in the near future. However, in contrast to the pre-pandemic period, they tend to express less uncertainty about inflation further in the future.
May 18, 2022
Global Supply Chain Pressure Index: May 2022 Update
Supply chain disruptions continue to be a major challenge as the world economy recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, recent developments related to geopolitics and the pandemic (particularly in China) could put further strains on global supply chains. In a January post, we first presented the Global Supply Chain Pressure Index (GSCPI), a parsimonious global measure designed to capture supply chain disruptions using a range of indicators. We revisited our index in March, and today we are launching the GSCPI as a standalone product, with new readings to be published each month. In this post, we review GSCPI readings through April 2022 and briefly discuss the drivers of recent moves in the index.
Posted at 10:00 am in Inflation, International Economics, Macroeconomics, Pandemic, Supply Chain | Permalink | Comments (1)
May 17, 2022
Do Businesses in the Region Expect High Inflation to Persist?
As the economy continues to recover from the pandemic, a combination of strong demand, severe supply disruptions, widespread labor shortages, and surging energy prices has contributed to a rapid increase in inflation. Indeed, the inflation rate, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), has exceeded 8 percent over the past year, the fastest pace of price increase since the early 1980s. If businesses and consumers expect inflation to be high in the future because it is elevated today, they may change their behavior accordingly, which can make inflation even more persistent. In other words, expectations about the path of future inflation can affect how current inflation will actually evolve. In particular, among businesses, expectations about future inflation can shape how they set wages and prices. Our May regional business surveys asked firms what they expected inflation to be one year, three years, and five years from now. Responses indicate that while businesses, like consumers, expect high inflation to continue over the next year, such elevated levels of inflation are not expected to persist over longer time horizons.
April 21, 2022
Who Are the Federal Student Loan Borrowers and Who Benefits from Forgiveness?
The pandemic forbearance for federal student loans was recently extended for a sixth time—marking a historic thirty-month pause on federal student loan payments. The first post in this series uses survey data to help us understand which borrowers are likely to struggle when the pandemic forbearance ends. The results from this survey and the experience of some federal borrowers who did not receive forbearance during the pandemic suggest that delinquencies could surpass pre-pandemic levels after forbearance ends. These concerns have revived debates over the possibility of blanket forgiveness of federal student loans. Calls for student loan forgiveness entered the mainstream during the 2020 election with most proposals centering around blanket federal student loan forgiveness (typically $10,000 or $50,000) or loan forgiveness with certain income limits for eligibility. Several studies (examples here, here, and here) have attempted to quantify the costs and distribution of benefits of some of these policies. However, each of these studies either relies on data that do not fully capture the population that owes student loan debt or does not separate student loans owned by the federal government from those owned by commercial banks and are thus not eligible for forgiveness with most proposals. In this post, we use representative data from anonymized credit reports that allows us to identify federal loans, calculate the total cost of these proposals, explore important heterogeneity in who owes federal student loans, and examine who would likely benefit from federal student loan forgiveness.
March 30, 2022
How Have the Euro Area and U.S. Labor Market Recoveries Differed?
The initial phase of the pandemic saw the euro area and U.S unemployment rates behave quite differently, with the rate for the United States rising much more dramatically than the euro area rate. Two years on, the rates for both regions are back near pre-pandemic levels. A key difference, though, is that U.S. employment levels were down by 3.0 million jobs in 2021:Q4 relative to pre-pandemic levels, while the number of euro area jobs was up 600,000. A look at employment by industry shows that both regions had large shortfalls in the accommodation and food services industries, as expected. A key difference is the government sector, with the number of those jobs in the euro area up by 1.5 million, while the government sector in the United States shed 600,000.
March 22, 2022
Student Loan Repayment during the Pandemic Forbearance
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought substantial financial uncertainty for many Americans. In response, executive and legislative actions in March and April 2020 provided unprecedented debt relief by temporarily lowering interest rates on Direct federal student loans to 0 percent and automatically placing these loans into administrative forbearance. As a result, nearly 37 million borrowers have not been required to make payments on their student loans since March 2020, resulting in an estimated $195 billion worth of waived payments through April 2022. However, 10 million borrowers with private loans or Family Federal Education Loan (FFEL) loans owned by commercial banks were not granted the same relief and continued to make payments during the pandemic. Data show that Direct federal borrowers slowed their paydown, with very few making voluntary payments on their loans. FFEL borrowers, who were not covered by the automatic forbearance, struggled with their debt payments during this time. The difficulties faced by these borrowers in managing their student loans and other debts suggest that Direct borrowers will face rising delinquencies once forbearance ends and payments resume.
March 1, 2022
Drivers of Inflation: The New York Fed DSGE Model’s Perspective
After a sharp decline in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation rebounded in the second half of 2020 and surged through 2021. This post analyzes the drivers of these developments through the lens of the New York Fed DSGE model. Its main finding is that the recent rise in inflation is mostly accounted for by a large cost-push shock that occurred in the second quarter of 2021 and whose inflationary effects persist today. Based on the model’s reading of historical data, this shock is expected to fade gradually over the course of 2022, returning quarterly inflation to close to 2 percent only in mid-2023.
February 16, 2022
The Omicron Wave Stalled Growth and Led to High Absenteeism in the Region
Even before the start of the new year, businesses in the tri-state region were hampered by supply disruptions, rising input costs, and difficulty finding adequate staff. On top of these challenges, the Omicron wave dealt another setback to the regional economy. With infections running high, many businesses were forced to deal with a combination of reduced demand from customers and renewed absenteeism among workers. Indeed, our regional business surveys indicate that economic growth stalled in early 2022 as firms continued to struggle to find workers. Moreover, employee absenteeism was reported to be nearly three times its normal level. While the path of recovery remains highly uncertain, firms generally expect conditions to improve in the months ahead and many are still adding or planning to add staff.
January 11, 2022
How the Fed’s Overnight Reverse Repo Facility Works
Daily take-up at the overnight reverse repo (ON RRP) facility increased from less than $1 billion in early March 2021 to just under $2 trillion on December 31, 2021. In the second post in this series, we take a closer look at this important tool in the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy implementation framework and discuss the factors behind the recent increase in volume.
Posted at 7:00 am in Bank Capital, Banks, Central Bank, COVID-19 Facilities, Credit, Crisis, Fed Funds, Federal Reserve, Financial Institutions, Monetary Policy, Pandemic, Repo | Permalink
January 6, 2022
The Effect of Monetary and Fiscal Policy on Inequality
How does accounting for households’ heterogeneity—and in particular inequality in income and wealth—change our approach to macroeconomics? What are the effects of monetary and fiscal policy on inequality, and what did we learn in this regard from the COVID-19 pandemic? What are the implications of inequality for the transmission of monetary policy, and its ability to stabilize the economy? These are some of the questions that were debated at a recent symposium on “Heterogeneity in Macroeconomics: Implications for Policy” organized by the new Applied Macroeconomics and Econometrics Center (AMEC) of the New York Fed on November 12.
Posted at 7:00 am in Equitable Growth, Inequality, Monetary Policy, Pandemic, Unemployment | Permalink
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