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Discussion Paper
When Are Central Bank Reserves Ample?
The Federal Reserve (Fed) implements monetary policy in a regime of ample reserves, whereby short-term interest rates are controlled mainly through the setting of administered rates. To do so, the quantity of reserves in the banking system needs to be large enough that everyday changes in reserves do not cause large variations in the policy rate, the so-called federal funds rate. As the Fed shrinks its balance sheet following the plan laid out by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) in 2022, how can it assess when to stop so that the supply of reserves remains ample? In the first post of ...
Discussion Paper
Opening the Toolbox: The Nowcasting Code on GitHub
In April 2016, we unveiled--and began publishing weekly--the New York Fed Staff Nowcast, an estimate of GDP growth using an automated platform for tracking economic conditions in real time. Today we go a step further by publishing the MATLAB code for the nowcasting model, available here on GitHub, a public repository hosting service. We hope that sharing our code will make it easier for people interested in monitoring the macroeconomy to understand the details underlying the nowcast and to replicate our results.
Report
Changing Risk-Return Profiles
We show that realized volatility in market returns and financial sector stock returns have strong predictive content for the future distribution of market returns. This is a robust feature of the last century of U.S. data and, most importantly, can be exploited in real time. Current realized volatility has the most information content on the uncertainty of future returns, whereas it has only limited content about the location of the future return distribution. When volatility is low, the predicted distribution of returns is less dispersed and probabilistic forecasts are sharper.
Report
Flighty liquidity
We study how the risks to future liquidity flow across corporate bond, Treasury, and stock markets. We document distribution ?flight-to-safety? effects: a deterioration in the liquidity of high-yield corporate bonds forecasts an increase in the average liquidity of Treasury securities and a decrease in uncertainty about the liquidity of investment-grade corporate bonds. While the liquidity of Treasury securities both affects and is affected by the liquidity in the other two markets, corporate bond and equity market liquidity appear to be largely divorced from each other. Finally, we show that ...
Report
Vulnerable growth
We study the conditional distribution of GDP growth as a function of economic and financial conditions. Deteriorating financial conditions are associated with an increase in the conditional volatility and a decline in the conditional mean of GDP growth, leading the lower quantiles of GDP growth to vary with financial conditions and the upper quantiles to be stable over time: Upside risks to GDP growth are low in most periods while downside risks increase as financial conditions become tighter. We argue that amplification mechanisms in the financial sector generate the observed growth ...
Report
Scarce, Abundant, or Ample? A Time-Varying Model of the Reserve Demand Curve
What level of central bank reserves satiates banks’ demand for liquidity? We estimate the slope of the reserve demand curve in the U.S. over 2010–2024 using a time-varying instrumental-variable approach at the daily frequency. When reserves exceed 12-13 percent of banks’ assets, demand for reserves is satiated and reserves are abundant; below this threshold, the curve’s slope becomes increasingly negative as reserves decline from ample to scarce. We also find that reserve demand has shifted over time, both vertically and horizontally, and identify important drivers of vertical shifts. ...
Discussion Paper
Global Trends in Interest Rates
Long-term government bond yields are at their lowest levels of the past 150 years in advanced economies. In this blog post, we argue that this low-interest-rate environment reflects secular global forces that have lowered real interest rates by about two percentage points over the past forty years. The magnitude of this decline has been nearly the same in all advanced economies, since their real interest rates have converged over this period. The key factors behind this development are an increase in demand for safety and liquidity among investors and a slowdown in global economic growth.
Working Paper
Unspanned macroeconomic factors in the yield curve
In this paper, we extract common factors from a cross-section of U.S. macro-variables and Treasury zero-coupon yields. We find that two macroeconomic factors have an important predictive content for government bond yields and excess returns. These factors are not spanned by the cross-section of yields and are well proxied by economic growth and real interest rates.
Report
800,000 Years of Climate Risk
We use a long history of global temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration to estimate the conditional joint evolution of temperature and CO2 at a millennial frequency. We document three basic facts. First, the temperature–CO2 dynamics are non-linear, so that large deviations in either temperature or CO2 concentrations take a long time to correct–on the scale of multiple millennia. Second, the joint dynamics of temperature and CO2 concentrations exhibit multimodality around historical turning points in temperature and concentration cycles, so that prior to the start of ...
Working Paper
Nowcasting GDP and inflation: the real-time informational content of macroeconomic data releases
This paper formalizes the process of updating the nowcast and forecast on output and inflation as new releases of data become available. The marginal contribution of a particular release for the value of the signal and its precision is evaluated by computing "news" on the basis of an evolving conditioning information set. The marginal contribution is then split into what is due to timeliness of information and what is due to economic content. We find that the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia surveys have a large marginal impact on the nowcast of both inflation variables and real ...