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Discussion Paper
The Commercial Paper Funding Facility
In mid-March, the Federal Reserve announced a slew of credit and liquidity facilities aimed at supporting credit provision to U.S. households and businesses. Among the initiatives is the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF) which aims to support market functioning and provide a liquidity backstop for the commercial paper market. The domestic commercial paper market provides a venue for short-term financing for companies which employ more than 6 million Americans. Securities in the commercial paper market represent a key asset class for money market mutual funds. This post documents the ...
Report
Decomposing real and nominal yield curves
We present an affine term structure model for the joint pricing of Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) and Treasury yield curves that adjusts for TIPS? relative illiquidity. Our estimation using linear regressions is computationally very fast and can accommodate unspanned factors. The baseline specification with six principal components extracted from Treasury and TIPS yields, in combination with a liquidity factor, generates negligibly small pricing errors for both real and nominal yields. Model-implied expected inflation provides a better prediction of actual inflation than ...
Discussion Paper
The Primary and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities
On April 9, the Federal Reserve announced that it would take additional actions to provide up to $2.3 trillion in loans to support the economy in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Among the initiatives are the Primary Market and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities (PMCCF and SMCCF), whose intent is to provide support for large U.S. businesses that typically finance themselves by issuing debt in capital markets. Corporate bonds support the operations of companies with more than 17 million employees based in the United States and these bonds are key assets for retirees and pension ...
Discussion Paper
Survey Measures of Expectations for the Policy Rate
Market prices provide timely information on policy expectations. But as we emphasized in our previous post, they can deviate from investors? expectations of the most likely path because they embed risk premiums and represent probability-weighted averages over different possible paths. In contrast, surveys explicitly ask respondents for their views on the likely path of economic variables. In this post, we highlight two surveys conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that provide information about expectations that can complement market-based measures.
Discussion Paper
Is U.S. Monetary Policy Seasonal?
Many economic time series display periodic and predictable patterns within each calendar year, generally referred to as seasonal effects. For example, retail sales tend to be higher in December than in other months. These patterns are well-known to economists, who apply statistical filters to remove seasonal effects so that the resulting series are more easily comparable across months. Because policy decisions are based on seasonally adjusted series, we wouldn?t expect the decisions to exhibit any seasonal behavior. Yet, in this post we find that the Federal Reserve has been much more likely ...
Discussion Paper
Interest Rate Derivatives and Monetary Policy Expectations
Market expectations of the path of future policy rates can have important implications for financial markets and the economy. Because interest rate derivatives enable market participants to hedge against or speculate on potential changes in various short-term U.S.interest rates, they are a rich and timely source of information on market expectations. In this post, we describe how information about market expectations can be derived from interest rate futures and forwards, focusing on three main instruments: federal funds futures, overnight index swaps (OIS), and Eurodollar futures. We also ...
Discussion Paper
Data Insight: Which Growth Rate? It’s a Weighty Subject
The growth rate in real gross domestic product (GDP) is a conventional indicator of the economy’s health. But the two ways of measuring annual GDP growth can give very different answers. In 2013, GDP grew 2.2 percent on a year-over-year basis, but at a faster 3.1 percent rate on a Q4-over-Q4 basis. So, which measure is more meaningful? We show in this post that the Q4/Q4 metric is better since it only considers quarterly growth rates during the current year, while the Year/Year measure depends on quarterly growth rates in both the current and previous year and puts considerable weight on ...
Discussion Paper
Treasury Term Premia: 1961-Present
Treasury yields can be decomposed into two components: expectations of the future path of short-term Treasury yields and the Treasury term premium. The term premium is the compensation that investors require for bearing the risk that short-term Treasury yields do not evolve as they expected. Studying the term premium over a long time period allows us to investigate what has historically driven changes in Treasury yields. In this blog post, we estimate and analyze the Treasury term premium from 1961 to the present, and make these estimates available for download here.
Discussion Paper
What Drives Forecaster Disagreement about Monetary Policy?
What can disagreement teach us about how private forecasters perceive the conduct of monetary policy? In a previous post, we showed that private forecasters disagree about both the short-term and the long-term evolution of key macroeconomic variables but that the shape of this disagreement differs across variables. In contrast to their views on other macroeconomic variables, private forecasters disagree substantially about the level of the federal funds rate that will prevail in the medium to long term but very little on the rate at shorter horizons. In this post, we explore the possible ...
Discussion Paper
Skills Mismatch, Construction Workers and the Labor Market
Recessions and recoveries typically have been times of substantial reallocation in the economy and the labor market, and the current cycle does not appear to be an exception. The speed and smoothness of reallocation depend in part on the structure of the labor market, particularly the degree of mismatch between the characteristics of available workers and newly available jobs. Such mismatches could occur because of differences in skills between workers and jobs (skills mismatch) or because of differences in the location of the available jobs and available workers (geographic mismatch). In ...