Food for thought over the long weekend.
Category Archives: financial markets
Preparing for lift-off
The strong October employment report makes it look likely that the era of zero interest rates will soon come to an end, at least for the United States.
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How Are Emerging Markets Responding to Anticipated US Tightening?
Just back from England and a couple of presentations, one at the CCBS on the Trilemma and monetary policy spillovers. Here are three graphs, related to the presentation, which illustrate how policymakers in different emerging market countries are responding to the stresses their economies are undergoing.
Debt, Devaluation, Trade, and More
Those were some of the topics covered at the West Coast Workshop on International Finance and Open Economy Macroeconomics, held last Friday on the beautiful UC-Santa Cruz campus, co-organized by Helen Popper (Santa Clara University), Michael Hutchison (UC Santa Cruz), and Carl Walsh (UC Santa Cruz).
Guest Contribution: “The 30th Anniversary of the Plaza Accord”
Today we are fortunate to have a guest contribution written by Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard University, and former Member of the Council of Economic Advisers, 1997-99.
Forecasting interest rates
There was lots of action in financial markets last week, with much of the attention focused on the U.S. Federal Reserve. The interest rate on a 10-year U.S. Treasury bond edged up 10 basis points early in the week in anticipation that the Fed might finally raise its target for the short-term interest rate. But it shed all that and more after the Fed announced it was standing pat for now.
Price of CBOE option based on 10-year U.S. Treasury yield; to convert to the Treasury yield itself divide by 10. Source: Google Finance.
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Liftoff: Empirical Assessment of the Implications for the Dollar
I have been stressing the international implications of a potential interest rate increase as a rationale for deferring monetary tightening. Export growth is slowing and economic activity in the tradables sector (manufacturing output, manufacturing employment) as the dollar has appreciated. [1] [2] How much more appreciation should we expect should the Fed tighten?
Government Debt Crowding Out Watch, Fall 2015
As I updated my slides for teaching an economics course on the financial system at UW-Madison, I recreated this graph, which depicts the rise in Federal debt as a share of GDP, and the trajectory of real interest rates, as proxied by several measures.
Guest Contribution: “Capital Controls in Brazil: Effective”
Today we are fortunate to present a guest contribution written by Marcos Chamon, Senior Economist in the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund, and Márcio Garcia, Associate Professor of Economics at PUC-Rio. The views expressed in this blog are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its management, nor its Executive Board.
To Log or Not to Log, Part V
The Shanghai stock market has undergone some wild gyrations over the last year… and back in 2008. Following up on To Log or Not to Log, Part IV: