Economics

In the latest BIS Quarterly Review, researchers Ryan Banerjee and Boris Hofmann consolidated some of the earlier research to illustrate the problem of zombie firms. They argued that the rise of zombies predated the 2008 financial crisis, and has since been dragging down the productivity of the real economy.

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:

"The [Standing Repo Facility (SRF)] rate is set at the top of the FOMC’s target range for the federal funds rate. This combination of an ample supply of reserves and an SRF rate at the top of the target range reduces the day-to-day reliance on the facility except during periods of significant upward pressure on rates resulting from strong liquidity demand or market stress," said John Williams

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.

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 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.

The Saturated Level of Reserves or efficient level of reserves, is the point which the opportunity cost for banks to hold reserves disappears, and became indifferent towards holding more reserves. The reserve demand curve beyond this point becomes close to horizontal.

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

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.

Welcome to the latest installment of our interview series “Where is the General Theory of the 21st Century?” “Where is the General Theory of the...