Quick links to a few items I found interesting.
Author Archives: James_Hamilton
Federal Reserve control of the short-term interest rate
Once upon a time, U.S. monetary policy was conducted with its primary target defined in terms of the fed funds rate, which is the interest rate on an overnight loan of Federal Reserve deposits between private banks or other institutions that hold accounts with the Fed. A bank that ended the day with more deposits in its account with the Fed than needed to meet its required balances could lend those funds to another bank that found itself short. The interest rate on these loans was very sensitive to the total level of excess reserves in the system. The Fed’s direct control of available reserves gave it near control of the interest rate on loans of fed funds, which was what made the fed funds rate a credible target for implementation of the FOMC’s policy directives.
Current economic conditions
The economy is slowly improving.
Presidents and the economy
An interesting new research paper by Princeton Professors Alan Blinder and Mark Watson examines differences in performance of the economy under Democratic versus Republican presidents. The paper begins:
The superiority of economic performance under Democrats rather than Republicans is nearly
ubiquitous; it holds almost regardless of how you define success. By many measures, the
performance gap is startlingly large–so large, in fact, that it strains credulity, given how little
influence over the economy most economists (or the Constitution, for that matter) assign to the
President of the United States.
Forward rates and monetary tightening
The Federal Reserve has been trying hard to communicate that it intends to keep short-term interest rates low for quite some time. The market seems to have embraced the message.
Lower gasoline prices
“U.S. gasoline prices have fallen to their lowest level in nearly 33 months amid a boom in domestic oil drilling”, the Wall Street Journal declared last week. That’s a true statement, but there’s more to the story.
Summarizing monetary policy
Before 2008, U.S. monetary policy was primarily conducted in terms of a target set by the Federal Reserve for the fed funds rate, which is the interest rate a bank pays to borrow funds overnight from other banks. A large academic literature used the fed funds rate as a summary of monetary policy, looking at its correlations in dynamic regressions with other variables of macroeconomic interest. But the fed funds rate has been stuck near zero for the last 5 years, and will likely be replaced by an alternative policy focus even once we exit the zero lower bound. Economic researchers face not just the difficulty of summarizing what the Fed has been doing in the current and future environment, but also the practical challenge of how to update their historical regressions to try to describe the full set of historical data along with the new experience in a coherent way. Here I describe a new research paper that suggests one solution to these problems.
U.S. economy continues moderate growth
Yesterday the BEA finally reported GDP numbers for the third quarter, a month later than originally scheduled owing to the earlier shut-down of federal operations. The U.S. economy is estimated to have grown at an annual rate of 2.8%. That’s below the historical average, but better than the previous three quarters.
Changing plans
Found this in my inbox this week:
UC has changed the menu of the health care plans
that will be offered in 2014. Most notably, the three currently available PPO
plans (Anthem Blue Cross PPO, Anthem Plus, and Anthem Lumenos) are being
discontinued. They are replaced by Blue Shield Health Savings Plan and UC
Care.
Why isn’t inflation lower?
With so much slack in the economy and so many Americans still looking for jobs, why hasn’t inflation been falling further? University of Texas Professor Olivier Coibion and Berkeley Professor Yuriy Gorodnichenko propose an answer in an interesting new research paper.