I’ve got new event study examples for my finance course! Trade policy measures that are evaluated to hurt profitability of major US listed firms have definitive effects on the Dow Jones index.
Figure 1: Dow Jones Industrial Average index. Red bold lines at announcement of impending Section 232 national security based trade restrictions on steel, and Section 301 trade sanctions aimed at China. Source: TradingEconomics.
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Remember those quaint notions of policy uncertainty holding back growth? Well, what to make of recent moves in uncertainty and risk indices, given all the talk of trade wars?
Figure 1: US daily Economic Policy Uncertainty index from Baker, Bloom and Davis (dark blue), and seven day centered moving average (red). Orange shading denotes Trump Administration. Source: policyuncertainty.com, and author’s calculations.
Figure 1: Dow Jones, 15 minute increments. Source: TradingEconomics.
Today, we present a guest post written by Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and formerly a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. This is an extended version of a column that appeared at Project Syndicate on February 22nd.
In my previous post, I recounted “The New Fama Puzzle” as it applied to dollar exchange rates, with focus on the euro/dollar rate. A quick observation: the reversal also appears for non-US dollar based exchange rates (against euro, yen, pound).
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How much of the increase in the 10 year constant maturity Treasury yield is from higher real rates, and from higher expected inflation?
Source: Federal Reserve Board via FRED.
Recalling the Fisherian identity:
it = rt + πet
One can take the total differential:
Δit = Δrt + Δπet
Hence, of the 0.49 percentage point change from December 15 to February 7 in ten year Treasury yields, 0.27 percentage points is accounted for by a real interest rate increase, and 0.22 percentage point by inflation expectations boost (abstracting from liquidity premia, etc.).
Over the five year horizon, of the 0.41 percentage point change, 0.28 percentage points is accounted for by the real rate change, and 0.21 percentage point from higher expected inflation.
All about why nominal rates are rising, in interview with Marketplace (Stan Collender comments too). We talk about the standard things — tax cuts, spending increases, Fed QE unwinding and rate increases, and (my contribution) the deceleration of foreign central bank Treasury purchases (graphical depiction here on page 6). Discussion of the last point with respect to China here.
I tire of hearing people who had one (or no) class in economics saying “the magic of the marketplace” will lead to the optimal outcome. What teaching finance has made me realize is that information problems are rife in many economic interactions. And one can’t be a student of currency crises without being even more convinced. The paper by Stijn Claessens and Ayhan Kose, “Macroeconomic Implications of Financial Frictions: A Survey” is a must-read for those who want to keep up with the literature. It has this fantastic schematic:
Three times.
Figure 1: Ten year minus three month Treasury spread (blue), and ten year minus three month Treasury spread (blue). December observations pertain to 12/6 daily observation. NBER defined recession dates shaded gray. Source: Federal Reserve via FRED, NBER and author’s calculations.
That’s the title of an excellent review authored by two leading experts, Stijn Claessens and Ayhan Kose, that is required reading for anyone who wants to glean the implications of asset price movements for what’s going to happen in the real economy. From the conclusion:
Challenges to theoretical and empirical findings. The links between asset prices and activity differ from the predictions of standard models in a number of ways. First, asset prices are much more volatile than fundamentals would imply and can at times deviate, or at least appear to do so, from their predicted fundamental values. The term structure of interest rates is not fully consistent with the simple expectation hypothesis. Although exchange rates can be modelled as the present value of expected fundamentals, they appear to be overly volatile,
as is the case between equity prices and their underlying dividend streams (the puzzle of “excess volatility”). Moreover, macroeconomic and financial news seem to have an exaggerated effect on asset prices: equities, bonds and currencies overreact to news about cash flows and other fundamentals.
Taking place today, this is the fifth in the series, with topics this year on exchange rates and monetary policy, macroprudential policy, credit and business cycles (sponsored by UC Santa Cruz Economics, Santa Clara Economics, and Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, organization chaired by Helen Popper at SCU and Grace Weishi Gu at UCSC).
The website is here with links to papers, conference agenda here.