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 latest BIS global liquidity indicators showed that the share of Non-bank USD denominated credit continued its rising trend.

In this installment, we continue our discussion with Prof. Charles Calomiris, Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions at Columbia Business School. The topic of this installment is the missing role of politics in economics models of banking crises. We also discussed if Calomiris thinks macroeconomics has a similar problem.

In their recent working paper "Nonbank Lending", economists Sergey Chernenko, Isil Erel, and Robert Prilmeier provided an insightful overview of the sources and terms of private debt financing during the post-crisis period.

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.

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

The honorable guest for this installment is Joseph E. Gagnon, senior fellow at Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE). We discussed one of his latest research paper "Unconventional Monetary and Exchange Rate Policies" and the new book he coauthored with C. Fred Bergsten, "Currency Conflict and Trade Policy: A New Strategy for the United States". Gagnon also shared his view on the very popular "Global Financial Cycle" ideas.

The floor system needs a cap on top of it. The sooner the Fed realizes it, the better they will be prepared for the coming financial turmoil.

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.

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.