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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 ...
Speech
The Federal Reserve’s Market Functioning Purchases: From Supporting to Sustaining
Remarks at SIFMA Webinar.
Speech
Bullard Discusses U.S. Economy and Monetary Policy during UBS Panel
St. Louis Fed President Jim Bullard shared his views on various aspects of the U.S. economy and monetary policy during a panel discussion at the UBS European Conference 2021.Bullard said he thinks that U.S. real GDP growth coming in softer than expected in the third quarter is “a temporary phenomenon,” with growth being pushed out to the fourth quarter and through next year. He expects real GDP growth to be higher than 4% for all of 2022.In discussing the very tight labor market in the U.S., Bullard cited the unemployment-to-vacancies ratio, the unemployment rate and a labor market ...
Journal Article
Examining the Performance of FOMC Inflation Forecasts
Calendar-year inflation forecasts from Federal Open Market Committee meeting participants typically start near 2% and then are revised in response to incoming data. Before the pandemic when actual inflation was mostly below 2%, participants consistently lowered their forecasts over time. From 2021 onward when inflation surged to 40-year highs, participants consistently raised their forecasts over time. In both periods, cumulative forecast revisions help predict the size of subsequent forecast errors. This implies that the typical inflation forecast was slow to adjust to new information that ...
Speech
A Time for Bold Action
Remarks at Economic Club of New York (delivered via videoconference).
Conference Paper
Opening Remarks: Monetary Policy in the Time of COVID
Working Paper
Fiscal policy: ex ante and ex post
The surge in fiscal deficits since 2008 has put a renewed focus on the authors? understanding of fiscal policy. The interaction of fiscal and monetary policy during this period has also been the subject of much discussion and analysis. This paper gives new insight into past fiscal policy and its influence on monetary policy by examining the U.S. Federal Reserve Board staff?s Greenbook forecasts of fiscal policy. The authors create a real-time database of the Greenbook forecasts of fiscal policy, examine the forecast performance in terms of bias and effciency, and explore the implications for ...
Speech
Gradual and predictable: reducing the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet: remarks at SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum, New York City
Remarks at SUERF ? The European Money and Finance Forum, New York City.