In testimony before the Senate Budget Committee yesterday, Fed Chair Ben Bernanke once again tells it like it is.
Category Archives: Federal Reserve
What will the Fed do next?
Probably nothing.
WIN buttons and Arthur Burns
I normally find myself agreeing with Dave Altig’s high-quality analysis over at Macroblog. But I’m afraid I have to leave Dave all alone in his latest quixotic mission to defend Arthur Burns (Chair of the Federal Reserve during the great inflationary episode from 1970 to 1978) and Gerald Ford’s old WIN buttons.
Bernanke in China
Distortion versus effective subsidy.
2006 and the Econbrowser crystal ball
This seems like a good time to review some of the occasions over the last year when I’ve been brave (or foolish) enough to make a specific quantitative prediction.
Housing: speculative bubble or fundamentals?
Caclulated Risk had some interesting observations this week about why forecasts for housing differ so widely across analysts.
The yield curve and the term premium
Some new studies suggest that the yield curve inversion might not be quite as ominous as some of us have been assuming.
Federal Reserve policy and mortgage rates
I’ve recently completed writing a research paper titled Daily Monetary Policy Shocks and the Delayed Response of New Home Sales. The paper develops some new measures of the delay between changes in Fed policy and the impact on the economy. In this, the second of three posts on the paper, I describe the paper’s findings about how the Federal Reserve affects mortgage lending rates.
Accuracy of futures prices as predictors of the fed funds rate
I’m just finishing writing a new research paper whose goal is to come up with a better measure and understanding of the lagged effect of monetary policy on the economy. One of my claims is that the public’s expectations of what the Fed is going to do next play a key role in that process. In this, the first of several posts based on that paper, I describe some of the properties I’ve found for fed funds futures prices as predictors of subsequent Fed policy changes.
One way or the other
Mixed signals this week leave Bernanke still needing to earn his pay.