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Working Paper
How Does the Fed Adjust its Securities Holdings and Who is Affected?
The Federal Open Market Committee indicated in its September 2017 post-meeting statement that it will initiate in October a balance sheet normalization program to gradually reduce its securities holdings. This action will put in place a policy of reinvesting and redeeming portions of the principal payments received by the Federal Reserve from its holdings of Treasury and agency securities. How are these adjustments to the Federal Reserve?s securities holdings transacted and who is affected? This paper provides a primer regarding how the Federal Reserve accounts for these securities ...
Working Paper
The effect of markups on the exchange rate exposure of stock returns
This paper examines how to properly specify and test for factors that affect the exchange-rate exposure of stock returns. We develop a theoretical model, which explicitly identifies three channels of exposure. An industry's exposure increases (1) by greater competitiveness in the market where its final output is sold, (2) the interaction of greater competitiveness in its export market and a larger share of exports in production and, (3) the interaction of less competitiveness in its imported input market and the smaller the share of imports in production. Using a sample of 82 U.S. ...
Working Paper
An empirical analysis of inflation in OECD countries
One of the most remarkable macroeconomic developments of the past decade has been the widespread decline in inflation despite declines in unemployment rates. For the United States, these seemingly contradictory developments have been reconciled in terms of three factors: (1) an acceleration in productivity, (2) structural changes in labor markets that lowered the natural unemployment rate (NAIRU), and (3) improved credibility of monetary policy. Here we ask whether comparable factors were at work in foreign industrial countries. To address this question, we empirically characterize the ...
Newsletter
Inflation Expectations, the Phillips Curve, and the Fed’s Dual Mandate
This Summer 2021 issue of Page One Economics describes how to think about stable prices, how inflation has evolved in recent years, how the relationship between inflation and employment is changing, and what the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has recently stated about its strategy to meet its price stability goal.
Newsletter
The Rise (and Fall) of Inflation During the Early 2020s
Inflation has been on many people’s minds. There are several measures of inflation available, and each one plays a role in providing a more complete understanding of inflation’s causes and effects. This Page One Economics® Econ Primer describes key measures of inflation, including the consumer price index, and how the Federal Open Market Committee pays particular attention to these measures as it makes policy decisions—adjusting its policy stance when necessary to move the economy toward maximum employment and price stability.
Working Paper
The Federal Reserve's balance sheet and earnings: a primer and projections
Over the past few years, the Federal Reserve's use of unconventional monetary policy tools has led it to hold a large portfolio of securities. The asset purchases are intended to put downward pressure on longer-term interest rates, but also affect the Federal Reserve's balance sheet and income. We present a framework for projecting Federal Reserve assets and liabilities and income through time. The projections are based on public economic forecasts and announced Federal Open Market Committee policy principles. The projections imply that for the next several years, the Federal Reserve's ...
Discussion Paper
The Federal Reserve's New Approach to Raising Interest Rates
At its December 2015 meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC)--the Federal Reserve's monetary policy committee--raised its target range for the federal funds rate by 25 basis points, marking the end of an extraordinary seven-year period during which the federal funds target range was held near zero to support the recovery of the U.S. economy from the worst financial crisis and recession since the Great Depression.
Working Paper
The effect of exchange rate fluctuations on multinationals' returns
This paper examines if the type of exchange rate used or size of the movement in the exchange rate matters in estimating exchange-rate exposure of U.S. nonfinancial multinationals. We find that switching from a broad trade-weighted exchange rate to a 2-digit SIC industry exchange rate increases the number of significantly exposed firms in a simple Jorion (1990) regression by 60 percent. Then separating crisis from non-crisis months we find additional evidence of exposure. Although the value of exposure does not change with the size of the exchange rate movement, we find some firms have ...
Working Paper
How Have Banks Been Managing the Composition of High-Quality Liquid Assets?
We study banks' post-crisis liquidity management. We construct time series of U.S. banks' holdings of high-quality liquid assets (HQLA) and examine how these assets have been managed in recent years to comply with the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) requirement. We find that, in becoming LCR compliant, banks initially ramped up their stock of reserve balances. However, once the requirement was met, some banks subsequently shifted the compositions of their liquid portfolios significantly. This raises the question: What drives the compositions of banks? HQLA? We show that a risk-return framework ...
Discussion Paper
Projected Evolution of the SOMA Portfolio and the 10-Year Treasury Term Premium Effect
An earlier Feds note used staff models to provide a projection for the evolution of the SOMA portfolio and an estimate of the associated term premium effect (TPE) on the 10-year Treasury yield. That analysis relied on economic, financial, and monetary policy assumptions as of April 2017. With the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcing a change in its reinvestment policy in its September 2017 post-meeting statement, this note provides updated projections.