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?

Rodrik explained why good economists think in terms of models, and what are major differences between models and theory. He also told us why macroeconomists' quest to find "the one true model" on the business cycle is probably misguided.

John Cochrane talks about Fiscal Theory of Price Level and how can we apply this theory on the current macroeconomy.

A careful study of Hong Kong's currency peg that explain why the current low-interest rate environment can be interpreted as a result of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority's policy choice.

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.

George Akerlof explains how the Keynesian- neoclassical synthesis dominated the field, and what problems this dominance resulted.

This is the second installment of our interview series "Where is the General Theory of the 21st Century?". In this second installment, we continue...

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

Since the Euro crisis, investors and policymakers are well aware of the so-called "doom loop" between the banking system and the sovereign. That is, a crisis originating in the banking system (sovereign) will weaken the sovereign (banking system), which in turn will worsen the banking (sovereign) crisis itself. In a recent ECB discussion Paper "Managing the sovereign-bank nexus", the 7 economists - Giovanni Dell’Ariccia, Caio Ferreira, Nigel Jenkinson, Luc Laeven, Alberto Martin, Camelia Minoiu, and Alexander Popov - coauthored the paper suggested that the banks and sovereigns are linked by three interacting channels:

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.