Search Results
Journal Article
Fear and loathing of central banks in America
The Federal Reserve System is America?s uneasy compromise between our dislike of concentrated financial power and our desire to promote efficiency in our national payments system. In fact, the Federal Reserve is the nation?s third attempt to establish a large national bank?what we now call a central bank?that is in a unique position to influence a nation?s money and credit. This Commentary retells the story of the rise and fall of the two earlier national banks, the Banks of the United States.
Journal Article
Island money
On a small group of islands in the South Pacific, the people use a money so astonishing it often gets mentioned in classroom discussions on the subject. This Commentary takes a closer look at the stone money of Yap and asks what such an odd form of money can teach us about our own.
Journal Article
Who is that guy on the $10 bill?
Alexander Hamilton is the least known and most misunderstood of our nation's founders. His contributions include creating a monetary standard, establishing our banking system, and ensuring the young nation's creditworthiness. This Economic Commentary explains how much of our financial strength we owe to Hamilton.
Report
Rethinking the measurement of household inflation expectations: preliminary findings
This paper reports preliminary findings from a Federal Reserve Bank of New York research program aimed at improving survey measures of inflation expectations. We find that seemingly small differences in how inflation is referred to in a survey can lead respondents to consider significantly different price concepts. For near-term inflation, the "prices in general" question in the monthly Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers can elicit responses that focus on the most visible prices, such as gasoline or food. Questions on the "rate of inflation" can lead to responses on the ...
Working Paper
Monitoring core inflation
An analysis of the use of limited-information estimators as measures of core inflation, showing that these estimators, such as the median of the cross-sectional distribution of inflation, have a higher correlation with past money growth and deliver improved forecasts of future inflation relative to the Consumer Price Index.
Journal Article
Midyear report of the Fourth District Economists' Roundtable
A summation of the May 20, 1994 meeting of the Fourth District Economists' Roundtable, at which participants offered their views on the current and prospective state of the economy and discussed the limitations of describing the U.S. business cycle.
Journal Article
Mirror, mirror, who’s the best forecaster of them all?
Say you need an accurate forecast of future GDP or inflation. What?s your best bet?the economist who was hot last year or the forecaster in the middle? The record indicates it?s tough to consistently beat the median prediction.
Journal Article
The trime
You might not have heard of the trime, the tiny 3-cent silver coin minted in the United States from 1851 to 1873, but it may have played a big role in shaping the kind of money you carry around in your wallet today.
Journal Article
The curiously different inflation perspectives of men and women
That men and women occasionally see things differently is not a remarkable observation. But that the sexes could report vastly different perspectives on the rate at which prices are rising over a long period of time is astonishing. This Commentary describes the difference in inflation sentiment held by men and women ? a puzzle that may hold the key to interpreting survey-based data on household inflation expectations.
Working Paper
A different kind of money illusion: the case of long and variable lags
An analysis of how the money supply process can affect the cross-covariance structure of inflation and monetary growth, showing that the Federal Reserve's change in emphasis to monetary targeting in late 1979 could have made the apparently long lag from money growth to inflation virtually disappear in the 1980s.