Economics

According to the data shown in the Congressional Budget Office‘s latest The Budget and Economic Outlook: From 2019 to 2029, there are $15.8 trillion US federal debt held by the public at the end of 2018.

HKD tends to be on the strong side (closer to HKD 7.75 per USD) when the interest rate differential is positive (HIBOR > LIBOR).

"There is a big difference between saying you want to allow for city-scale reform zones that will encourage reform of government and innovation in government, and saying that you want to do away with government entirely and let a corporate entity run a private city," says Nobel winning economist Paul Romer.

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.

Federal Reserve announced yesterday that it will start purchasing Treasury bills from Oct 15 (Tuesday) until at least the second quarter of next year.

Trump-appointed Fed governors will hold a board majority by the time Powell steps down as a governor. And that could matter a lot.

In their working paper "A Skeptical View of the Impact of the Fed's Balance Sheet," economists David Greenlaw, James D. Hamilton, Ethan Harris, and Kenneth D. West challenge some earlier studies that concluded QEs have a significant economic impact. Their major argument is that those research used simple event studies to quantify the impact of QE.

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.

Atif Mian, co-author of House of Debt, discusses what he thinks are the "revolutionary" changes in macroeconomic academia since the Great Recession.

Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the de facto central bank of Hong Kong, announced on April 22 that it will utilize the Fed's FIMA Repo facility to borrow USD 10 billion of cash.