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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.
Discussion Paper
What Can We Learn from the Timing of Interbank Payments?
From 2008 to 2014 the Federal Reserve vastly increased the size of its balance sheet, mainly through its large-scale asset purchase programs (LSAPs). The resulting abundance of reserves affected the financial system in a number of ways, including by changing the intraday timing of interbank payments. In this post we show that (1) there appears to be a nonlinear relationship between the amount of reserves in the system and the timing of interbank payments, and (2) with the increase in reserves, smaller banks shifted their timing of payments more significantly than larger banks did. This result ...
Journal Article
The rising gap between primary and secondary mortgage rates
While mortgage rates reached historic lows during 2012, the spread between primary and secondary rates rose to very high levels. This trend reflected a number of factors that potentially affected mortgage originator costs and profits and restrained the pass-through from lower secondary rates to borrowers? funding costs. This article describes the mortgage origination and securitization process and the way in which originator profits are determined. The authors calculate a series of originator profits and unmeasured costs (OPUCs) for the period 1994 to 2012, and show that these OPUCs increased ...
Discussion Paper
Has MBS Market Liquidity Deteriorated?
Mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by the government-backed entities Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae, or so-called ?agency MBS,? are the primary funding source for U.S. residential housing. A significant deterioration in the liquidity of the MBS market could lead investors to demand a premium for transacting in this important market, ultimately raising borrowing costs for U.S. homeowners. This post looks for evidence of changes in agency MBS market liquidity, complementing similar posts studying liquidity in U.S. Treasury and corporate bond markets.