Stanford Professor John Taylor has suggested that monetary policy could be summarized in terms of a simple rule, lowering interest rates when output is too low and raising them when inflation is too high. A number of academic papers have investigated this rule from the perspective of describing what the Federal Reserve has historically done. In a new paper co-authored with Federal Reserve economist Seth Pruitt and Office of Immigration Statistics economist Scott Borger, I take a look at what monetary policy rule the market perceived the Fed to be following over different historical periods.
Author Archives: James_Hamilton
The Road Ahead for the Fed
Tom Keene has been doing a series for Bloomberg Radio this week on the new book, The Road Ahead for the Fed. You can listen to Tom’s interviews with me or three of the other authors who contributed to the book by clicking on a link below.
Replay of 1930?
We know the glass is both half empty and half full. But the real question is whether liquid is being added in or draining out.
Current economic conditions
This was another week when everybody but me sees an economic recovery in the works.
Paying for design flaws
Updates on what this is going to cost you and me.
Links for 2009-08-10
I spent the last week of July as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, home to Macroblog and a number of superb economists. Their Center for Quantitative Economic Research is now going to be reporting my GDP-Based Recession Indicator Index, as you’ll see from following the link.
Jeff Miller has been looking carefully into the BLS birth-death adjustments (
[1],
[2],
[3]).
And I was interested in this story from the Wall Street Journal:
Houston-based Apache Corp. [APA] has agreed to provide natural gas for export to Asia through a proposed project in Canada, the latest sign that huge gas discoveries in North America are reshaping global energy markets. Kitimat LNG Inc., the Canadian company planning to build the liquefied-natural-gas export terminal in Kitimat, British Columbia, will announce Monday that Apache has become the second major North American gas producer to sign on to the project. Last month, another Houston-based gas producer, EOG Resources Inc., signed a similar deal….
“We’re confident that there’s going to be plenty of gas available for export for a long time,” said Greg Weeres, vice president of Pacific Northern Gas Ltd., which is planning to build a pipeline to supply gas to the Kitimat facility.
It’s not over yet
Some are greeting Friday’s employment report as an all-clear signal. But my advice is, keep your helmet on– they’re still shooting real bullets out there.
Pricing of interest rate risk in fed funds futures contracts
Do current fed funds futures prices signal a belief by market participants that the Fed may begin raising interest rates early next year? My latest
research paper
suggests not.
Current economic conditions
July auto sales might be viewed as the first solid indicator of an improving U.S. economy. But what does it really tell us?
Cash for clunkers
A victim of its own success?