EconReporter

What if I tell you, behind the boring news headline, there is actually a wonkish story about how the Hong Kong central bank took advantage of the monetary easing by the Fed in the last 12 year and created a new set of policy options that it can now use to actively mange the inflows created by the new round Fed easing under the Great Lockdown.

In a recent research, four European Central Bank economists found that negative interest rate policy in the eurozone can encourage banks to increase lending and encourage cooperations to increase investments. That is, contrary to what macroeconomics models usually predict, interest rate policy can still has stimulative effect even the zero lower bound is reached.

Lorie Logan, president of Dallas Fed, expressed worry about uncertainty surrounding the exact level of neutral rate of interest and hinted at the risk that the Federal Reserve's policy rate might already near the point which further rate may starts to fuel inflation again

The Federal Reserve is expected to cut its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points this week. This has been the baseline market assumption since Chairman Jerome Powell's speech at Jackson Hole, in which he proclaimed, “the shifting balance of risks may warrant adjusting our policy stance." The question is, how many dissenting votes will Powell face in this meeting?

While GDP rebounded by 0.65% in Q3 (2.6% annualized), the expansion was driven almost entirely by a 2.2% drop in imports.

In a recent study "Bank Equity and Banking Crises" by Matthew Baron (of Cornell University), Emil Verner (MIT Sloan), and Wei Xiong (Princeton University), the three economists developed a comprehensive database of bank equity prices and banking crises with a full-sample of 46 countries from 1870-2016. They try to understand the dynamic between bank equity decline and banking crises.

Inflation projections by Fed officials show that PCE inflation will not reach 2% by the end of 2025. Why the Fed expects to cut rate next year then?

Ricardo Reis, economics professor at the London School of Economics, explained that there were telling signs that the increase in cost of living started ealry-2021 was not a "transitory" phenomenon.

In a recent IMF working paper "Overfitting in Judgment-based Economic Forecasts: The Case of IMF Growth Projections", economist Klaus-Peter Hellwig examined IMF's World Economic Forecasts (WEO) and check if the forecast model suffer from the problem of overfitting.

A new working paper from the IMF which tries to assess the impact of media sentiment on equity markets.