The latest data on retail sales, tax receipts, and consumer sentiment all look consistent with the soft landing scenario.
Category Archives: Federal Reserve
And they all lived happily ever after
Can high-flying stocks be reconciled with an inverted yield curve? David Rosenberg of Merrill Lynch, via Felix Salmon and Business Week thinks “it is highly doubtful that both asset classes can be getting the story right.” But here’s one scenario under which both markets in fact might be telling the same story.
Watching housing slide
The Census Bureau
yesterday released August data for housing permits and new housing starts, both of which confirm that we are in the midst of a significant housing downturn.
Inflation expectations
So where’s the surge in inflation expectations, now that the Fed has stopped tightening?
Good and not-so-good reasons to disagree with Bernanke
Some of the reasons people have given for why the Fed should keep raising interest rates make sense to me, and some don’t.
Could it be that we’re already in a recession? Lessons from the last episode
There’s a lot of talk about recession these days, despite the fairly rapid average growth of GDP in the past few quarters. Krugman (via DeLong) observes a slowdown is coming that might feel a lot like a recession. DeLong considers whether Fed policy has already raised rates to such a degree a recession is inevitable. Roubini bravely cites probabilities. My colleague James Hamilton provides a contrasting opinion, based upon his academic work with Chauvet [pdf].
Econbrowser (and hopefully Bernanke) gets it right
As we predicted here last Friday the Federal Reserve announced today its decision to hold the fed funds rate constant at 5.25%.
A pause it shall be
The last month has been something of a cliffhanger for Fed watchers. But today the market seemed to make up its mind.
About that pause
A few weeks ago I noted that the fed funds futures contracts seemed to reflect an expectation that we’d see one more rate hike this fall, and that would be it. But a lot can change in two weeks. Now the message looks more like, “that’s it!”
Reading the yield curve
What are the implications of the current shape of the yield curve?