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?

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.

Jeremy Stein, former Federal Reserve governor, talks to us about his recent research “The Federal Reserve's Balance Sheet as a Financial-Stability Tool” and why the Fed should maintain a sizeable balance sheet.

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

Inflation projections by Fed officials show that PCE inflation will not reach 2% by the end of 2025. Why the Fed expects to cut rate next year then?

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 policy research, Joseph Gagnon of Peterson Institute for International Economics and Brian Sack of D.E. Shaw Group asked an important question: when the Federal Reserve implement QE in the next crisis, should they use it somewhat differently?

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.

The Swiss sovereign-money referendum, also known as the Sovereign-Money Initiative, which aims to creates a safe and crisis-free, yet experimental, banking system in Switzerland will be held on 10th June.

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.