Search Results
Journal Article
The national debt: a secular perspective
An examination of the various factors that have determined the level and growth of the federal debt over the past 40 years, with some perspective on future levels of federal debt.
Journal Article
Measures of corporate earnings: what number is best?
Revelations of corporate fraud in 2002 shook the public's confidence in financial reporting and led to calls for reform. Without credible, transparent, and comparable financial information, investors, auditors, and others cannot make decisions that are essential to the efficient functioning of the economy. But while rules can be improved, it is not possible to achieve a rigid standard that applies uniformly to every company. This Economic Commentary explains why.
Journal Article
Debt growth and the financial system
An examination of the extraordinary growth of domestic nonfinancial debt since 1982 and a discussion of policy issues raised by its relation to the stability of the financial system.
Working Paper
Results of a study of the stability of cointegrating relations comprised of broad monetary aggregates
There is strong evidence of a stable ?money demand? relationship for MZM and M2 through the 1990s. Though the M2 relationship breaks down somewhere around 1990, evidence has been accumulating that the disturbance is well characterized as a permanent upward shift in M2 velocity that began around 1990 and was largely over by 1994. This paper?s results support the hypothesis that households permanently reallocated a portion of their wealth from time deposits to mutual funds. This reallocation may have been induced by depository restructuring, but it could also be explained by appropriately ...
Journal Article
New Rules for Credit Default Swap Trading: Can We Now Follow the Risk?
Credit default swaps, a useful but complex financial innovation of the 1990s, were traded over the counter before the financial crisis. Because of this infrastructure, a very opaque market emerged?and from it, the severe risk imbalances that helped fuel the crisis. Reforms are now being worked out and put in place which will move the majority of credit default swaps transactions to more transparent exchanges. Market participants will be able to see pre-trade and posttrade pricing, and regulators will have access to information that will allow them to monitor risk concentrations as they ...
Journal Article
MZM: a monetary aggregate for the 1990s?
A presentation of some tentative evidence that MZM, an alternative money measure comprising all instruments payable at par on demand, has exhibited a fairly stable relationship with nominal GDP and with its own opportunity cost in recent years, suggesting a potential role for policy.
Journal Article
Rules versus discretion: making a monetary rule operational
A history and analysis of the debate about whether monetary policy should be conducted by rules known in advance to all or by policymaker discretion.
Journal Article
Public pensions under stress
The financial crisis has made it all too clear that regulators failed to see into the dark corners of the financial system. With that in mind, the Federal Reserve Banks of Cleveland and Atlanta have formed a Financial Monitoring Team to study pension funds and municipal finance with an eye toward implications for the wider economy and financial system. What concerns should we have? In this article and other articles from this spring issue of Forefront, we explain where risks could be building and how reforms might help forestall their impact on the broader economy and financial system.
Journal Article
The demand for M2, opportunity cost, and financial change
An analysis of the recent weakness in M2 growth that attempts to measure the opportunity cost of the aggregate more accurately and that explores the potential effects of the thrift industry restructuring on the adjustment of money demand to its long-run equilibrium level.
Journal Article
Monetary policy and inflation: 1993 in perspective
An overview of monetary policy developments in 1993, discussed in the context of the longer-term objective of price stability.