Why is the Hong Kong-US interest rate spread so persistent? — Currency peg in...
A spread of over 3.5 percentage points between US and Hong Kong Interest rate persisted for close to two months and so far arbitrage has failed to close the gap, leading to discussion of whether Hong Kong's Linked Exchange System is failing. This article, however, will explore some technical factors behind this interesting interest rate gap.
Where are the endpoints of QT? Ample Reserve System vs Demand-driven Floor System
Quantitative tightening (QT)—a process central banks use to reverse years of liquidity creation from quantitative easing (QE)—is concluding in many advanced economies. The central banks are growing confident that reserve levels in their financial systems are nearing their endpoints.
Where are the endpoints of QT and what come next?
What is Payment on Reserves Process?
The payment on reserve process proposed by Robert Hall and Ricardo Reis is a way of remunerating reserves which would give the central bank...
How to benefit from others’ QE — Hong Kong Linked Exchange Rate’s lesson
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.
IMF Growth Projections and Overfitting in Judgment-based Economic Forecasts
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.
‘Unusually low’ Hong Kong interest rate is a policy choice*
A careful study of Hong Kong's currency peg that explain why the current low-interest rate environment can be interpreted as a result of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority's policy choice.
What comes after housing market bubble?
An investigation into the probability of a crash in house prices following a housing bubble
Is there a Zero Lower Bound?
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.
CoCo issuance and bank fragility
A series of papers by Stefan Avdjiev, Bilyana Bogdanova, Patrick Bolton, Wei Jiang, and Anastasia Kartasheva on this topic is highly recommended.
The sovereign-bank “doom loop”
Since the Euro crisis, investors and policymakers are well aware of the so-called "doom loop" between the banking system and the sovereign. That is, a crisis originating in the banking system (sovereign) will weaken the sovereign (banking system), which in turn will worsen the banking (sovereign) crisis itself.
In a recent ECB discussion Paper "Managing the sovereign-bank nexus", the 7 economists - Giovanni Dell’Ariccia, Caio Ferreira, Nigel Jenkinson, Luc Laeven, Alberto Martin, Camelia Minoiu, and Alexander Popov - coauthored the paper suggested that the banks and sovereigns are linked by three interacting channels:
