Measuring Federal Reserve officials’ secret disagreement behind locked doors of FOMC meetings
Dissent votes in Federal Reserve policy meetings are rare, accounting for only 6.37% of the votes between 1976 and 2017. However, opting not to vote against the FOMC consensus doesn't necessarily mean committee members don't "disagree" with it.
Should Federal Reserve use scenario analysis to handle trade war uncertainty?
The Fed is currently in a "wait and see" mode in deciding what is the reaction to Trump's trade policy. But is it possible for the Fed to be a bit more proactive than merely saying "we will be able to update you further when we know more details"?
Enters scenario analysis.
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.
“Concrete Economics” Review
Prof. Brad Delong's blogs, either "bradford-delong.com" or over at " Equitable Growth" , are definitely two of the most influential economics blogs in the...
How often companies in Eurozone change their prices?
An ECB survey found that the retailers review and change their prices most often, while consumer and business service firms adjust their pricing the least often. Firms in the manufacturing sector, meanwhile, have a price adjustment frequency somewhere in between the above sectors
Economic benefit of asset market bubble
What the impact of asset price bubbles on US economic growth is.
Why the Fed announces “not-QE” Treasuries purchase program?
Federal Reserve announced yesterday that it will start purchasing Treasury bills from Oct 15 (Tuesday) until at least the second quarter of next year.
September FOMC Meeting: The Potential Dissenters
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?
FedSpeak Might Not Have Much Effects on Public’s Inflation Expectation
In a recent NBER working paper "Monetary Policy Communications and their Effects on Household Inflation Expectations", economists Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Michael Weber tried to find out how the household's expectation for inflation change with regard to the information they received.
Why hadn’t Federal Reserve rescued Lehman Brothers in 2008?
This week, the trio who was directly responsible for the decision to let Lehman fail – Bernanke, Tim Geithner (then New York Fed President), and Hank Paulson (then Treasury Secretary) – joined together at a panel held by Brookings Institution and spoke about the lessons they had learned from the crisis.















