Economics

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?

The faster the credit growth, the worse it is for real growth (output per worker). This is what Stephen G. Cecchetti and Enisse Kharroubi want to explain in their NBER working paper "Why Does Credit Growth Crowd Out Real Economic Growth?"

“The money helicopter has arrived,” Claire Jones writes in her FT Alphaville post, citing Hong Kong Finance Secretary’s announcement of a handout of HKD...

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

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.

A standard perception of PPI is that it is a measure of "wholesale inflation", but the BLS told EconReporter that this interpretation of PPI is not at all correct.

An important question is how do we get the series IDs for the data you need. The short answer is through BLS's Data Finder

Standing Repo Facility (SRF) is a relatively young Federal Reserve facility. Formally established as a permanent tool in July 2021, SRF allows banks to obtain overnight liquidity with high-quality collaterals like Treasuries through a repurchase agreement. Most people may not be familiar with this "obscure" Fed tool, but it is possible that SRF will soon become one of the Fed's most important tools.

In the interview, Ricardo Reis discuss with us his latest research project - "Reservism", the study of the role of reserves on central bank balance sheets and their implications for central bank solvency, quantitative easing, and the ability to control inflation.

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.