Search Results
Journal Article
Would an inflation target help anchor U.S. inflation expectations?
Since the October 2005 nomination of Ben Bernanke to become Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, there has been increasing speculation in the financial press that the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) might soon adopt an explicit numerical objective for inflation. However, skeptics of inflation targeting have maintained that this would constrain the FOMC and might provide little benefit in return?after all, it has been argued, haven't inflation expectations in the U.S. been well anchored since the early to mid-1990s? ; In this Economic Letter, I discuss recent research on whether ...
Journal Article
Convergence of long-term bond yields in the euro area
This Economic Letter takes a closer look at the effect of European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) on long-term government bond yields in the four largest euro zone countries: France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
Journal Article
The zero lower bound and longer-term yields
The Federal Reserve lowered its traditional monetary policy instrument, the federal funds rate, to essentially zero in December 2008. However, economic activity generally depends on interest rates with longer maturities than the overnight fed funds rate. Research shows that interest rates with maturities of two years or more were largely unconstrained by the zero lower bound until at least late 2011. This suggests that, despite the zero bound, the Fed has been able to continue conducting monetary policy through medium- and longer-term interest rates by using forward guidance and large-scale ...
Journal Article
Structural and cyclical economic factors
The recent recession and recovery raise important questions about the relative weight of structural and cyclical factors in the economy. A recent San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank conference explored the extent to which different economic variables behaved in a standard cyclical fashion during this episode or were scarred in a more permanent, structural manner. Both cyclical and structural effects appear evident in the recession, suggesting that some features of the U.S. economy can benefit from stimulatory monetary and fiscal policy, while others are more permanently damaged and unlikely to ...
Journal Article
Operation Twist and the effect of large-scale asset purchases
The Federal Reserve's current large-scale asset purchase program, dubbed "QE2," has a precedent in a 1961 initiative by the Kennedy Administration and the Federal Reserve known as "Operation Twist." An analysis finds that four of six potentially market-moving Operation Twist announcements had statistically significant effects and that the program cumulatively caused a significant but moderate 0.15 percentage point reduction in longer-term Treasury yields. These results can be used to estimate QE2's effects.
Journal Article
What we do and don't know about the term premium
Understanding long-term interest rate fluctuations requires one to understand what the term premium is and how it may change over time. In this Economic Letter, we define the term premium and explain the state of the art in measuring it. We conclude with some discussion of the limitations of our current knowledge.
Journal Article
Financial market imperfections and macroeconomics: conference summary
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco?s annual macroeconomics conference focused this year on the theme ?Financial Market Imperfections and Macroeconomics.? Conference papers> explored the empirical and theoretical performance of the U.S. and international economies before, during, and after a financial crisis. Financial crises are typically associated with severe economic downturns, but monetary policy can help to offset some of these effects. The unconventional monetary policies pursued by many central banks after the most recent crisis may have helped prevent it from becoming much ...
Journal Article
Macroeconomic models for monetary policy: conference summary
Papers presented at the conference on ?Macroeconomic Models for Monetary Policy? held March 6, 2009, at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco addressed such issues as how to model wage and price behavior and how to measure economic output. The answers to these and other questions examined at the conference are highly relevant for monetary policy and for the macroeconomic models in use at central banks around the world.
Journal Article
Inflation targeting and the anchoring of inflation expectations in the western hemisphere
We investigate the extent to which long-run inflation expectations are well anchored in three Western Hemisphere countries - Canada, Chile, and the United States - using a high-frequency event-study analysis. Specifically, we use daily data on far-ahead forward inflation compensation - the difference between forward rates on nominal and inflation-indexed bonds - as an indicator of financial market perceptions of inflation risk and the expected level of inflation at long horizons. For the United States, we find that far-ahead forward inflation compensation has reacted significantly to ...
Conference Paper
On signal extraction and non-certainty-equivalence in optimal monetary policy rules
A standard result in the literature on monetary policy rules is that of certainty equivalence: given the expected values of all the state variables of the economy, policy should be set in a way that is independent of all higher moments of those variables. Some exceptions to this rule have been pointed out by Smets (1998), who restricts policy to respond to only a limited subset of state variables, and by Orphanides (1998), who restricts policy to respond to estimates of the state variables that are biased. In contrast, this paper studies unrestricted, fully optimal policy rules with optimal ...