Author Archives: James_Hamilton

What’s going to happen to the Fed’s balance sheet?

The Federal Reserve has increased its assets from $900 billion in 2007 to over $3,150 billion and still climbing today. On the liabilities side of the Fed’s balance sheet, reserve balances held by banks have gone from $10 B in 2007 to $1,750 B and climbing today. My expectation had always been that this would be a temporary situation, with a return to historical norms when economic conditions improved. Recently, three different teams have independently studied what that transition back to normal might look like. One study was carried out by Robert Hall and Ricardo Reis (professors at Stanford and Columbia, respectively) and another by Seth Carpenter, Jane Ihrig, Elizabeth Klee, Alexander Boote, and Daniel Quinn (all economists at the Federal Reserve Board). I participated in a third study with David Greenlaw at Morgan Stanley, Peter Hooper at Deutsche Bank, and Frederic Mishkin at Columbia. Our analysis used a similar methodology to that conducted by the Fed staff, and we reached similar conclusions to theirs, while Hall and Reis took a broader and more theoretical perspective. Here I describe the methods and findings of our study.

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Why I’m more worried than Paul Krugman about the U.S. debt burden

I have been writing recently ([1], [2]) about my paper Crunch Time: Fiscal Crises and the Role of Monetary Policy, co-authored with David Greenlaw (Managing Director and Chief U.S. Fixed Income Economist for Morgan Stanley), Peter Hooper (Managing Director and Chief Economist for Deutsche Bank Securities Inc.), and Frederic Mishkin (professor at Columbia University and former governor of the Federal Reserve). Our paper has generated some interesting discussion by
Paul Krugman and
Matthew O’Brien, among others, to which I’d like to respond.

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Does the U.S. risk a fiscal tipping point?

In my previous post
I reviewed the recent experience of a number of countries whose sovereign debt levels became sufficiently high that creditors began to have doubts about the government’s ability to stabilize debt relative to GDP. When this happens, the government starts to face a higher interest rate, which makes debt stabilization all the more difficult. Is there any danger of the same adverse feedback loop starting to matter for the United States?

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Fiscal tipping points

At the recent U.S. Monetary Policy Forum I presented the paper Crunch Time: Fiscal Crises and the Role of Monetary Policy, along with co-authors David Greenlaw (Managing Director and Chief U.S. Fixed Income Economist for Morgan Stanley), Peter Hooper (Managing Director and Chief Economist for Deutsche Bank Securities Inc.), and Frederic Mishkin (professor at Columbia University and former governor of the Federal Reserve). One of the goals of our research was to try to understand the events that can lead a country to a tipping point in which it faces rapid increases in the interest rate on its sovereign debt, as a result of which the country finds itself with an unmanageable fiscal burden.

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