Economics

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.

The above figure shows the balance sheet of four major central banks from 2005 to 2015. Above the horizontal axis is the asset side...

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.

Federal Reserve decided to cut rate by an supersized 0.5 percentage point. The decision finally ended the weeks-long market debate of whether the central bank would cut 25 or 50 basis points. One important thing, though, didn't reach the headline: The Fed has never been this "confused" about where the natural rate should be.

Edited transcript of our interview with Paul Romer, on why the US urgently to scale up testing for Covid-19 and why he thinks the covid-crisis amounts an intellectual failure

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.

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

The figure above is from a recent BIS working paper "A key currency view of global imbalances". It shows the currency geography as of four dates from the last days of Bretton Woods until now: 1968, 1985, 2001 and 2017.

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?

In recent months, the Global Economic Policy Uncertainty index has risen to a level much higher than periods around the 911 Terrorist Attack or the 2008 Financial Crisis, hence the conclusion that the economic policy is unprecedently uncertain now. But here is why you might not have to worry.