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Working Paper
The Welfare Effects of Bank Liquidity and Capital Requirements
The stringency of bank liquidity and capital requirements should depend on their social costs and benefits. This paper investigates their welfare effects and quantifies their welfare costs using sufficient statistics. The special role of banks as liquidity providers is embedded in an otherwise standard general equilibrium growth model. Capital and liquidity requirements mitigate moral hazard from deposit insurance, which, if unchecked, can lead to excessive credit and liquidity risk at banks. However, these regulations are also costly because they reduce the ability of banks to create net ...
Report
Drivers of Dollar Share in Foreign Exchange Reserves
The share of U.S. dollar assets in the official foreign exchange reserve portfolios of central banks, at times, is taken as an indicator of dollar status. We show that the observed decline in aggregate U.S. dollar shares is not from a systematic decline in preferences for dollar assets. Instead, it is explained by a small group of countries, both due to monetary policies executed vis-à-vis euros and due to a small group of large foreign exchange reserve balance countries. Regression analysis shows that relative interest rates of reserve currencies and nontraditional currencies can tilt ...
Report
Risk-Free Rates and Convenience Yields Around the World
We infer risk-free rates from index option prices to estimate safe asset convenience yields in ten G-11 currencies. Countries' convenience yields increase linearly with the level of their interest rates, with U.S. convenience yields being the fifth largest. During financial crises, convenience yields grow, but the difference between U.S. and foreign convenience yields generally does not. Covered interest parity (CIP) deviations using our option-implied rates are roughly the same size between the U.S. and each other country. A model where convenience yields depend on domestic financial ...
Working Paper
Monetary policy surprises, positions of traders, and changes in commodity futures prices
Using futures data for the period 1990?2008, this paper finds evidence that expansionary monetary policy surprises tend to increase crude and heating oil prices, and contractionary monetary policy shocks increase gold and platinum prices. Our analysis uncovers substantial heterogeneity in the magnitude of this response to positive and negative surprises across different commodities and commodity groups. The results also suggest that the positions of futures traders for the metals and energy commodities strongly respond to monetary policy shocks. The adjustment of the net long positions of ...
Discussion Paper
A New Perspective on Low Interest Rates
Interest rates in the United States have remained at historically low levels for many years. This series of posts explores the forces behind the persistence of low rates. We briefly discuss some of the explanations advanced in the academic literature, and propose an alternative hypothesis that centers on the premium associated with safe and liquid assets. Our argument, outlined in a paper we presented at the Brookings Conference on Economic Activity last March, suggests that the increase in this premium since the late 1990s has been a key driver of the decline in the real return on U.S. ...
Discussion Paper
A Time-Series Perspective on Safety, Liquidity, and Low Interest Rates
The previous post in this series discussed several possible explanations for the trend decline in U.S. real interest rates since the late 1990s. We noted that while interest rates have generally come down over the past two decades, this decline has been more pronounced for Treasury securities. The conclusion that we draw from this evidence is that the convenience associated with the safety and liquidity embedded in Treasuries is an important driver of the secular (long-term) decline in Treasury yields. In this post and the next, we provide an overview of the two complementary empirical ...
Working Paper
Quantitative Easing and Safe Asset Scarcity: Evidence from International Bond Safety Premia
Through large-scale asset purchases, widely known as quantitative easing (QE), central banks around the world have reduced the available supply of safe assets. We examine the effects of the European Central Bank’s asset purchases in the 2015-2021 period on an international panel of bond safety premia from four highly rated countries: Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland. We find statistically significant negative effects for all four countries. This points to a novel and important international spillover channel of QE programs to bond safety premia that operates via changes in the ...
Report
Safety, liquidity, and the natural rate of interest
Why are interest rates so low in the Unites States? We find that they are low primarily because the premium for safety and liquidity has increased since the late 1990s, and to a lesser extent because economic growth has slowed. We reach this conclusion using two complementary perspectives: a flexible time-series model of trends in Treasury and corporate yields, inflation, and long-term survey expectations, and a medium-scale dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We discuss the implications of this finding for the natural rate of interest.
Working Paper
The role of commodity prices in forecasting U.S. core inflation
This note documents a curious finding about the substantial forecast ability of a simple aggregator of three commodity futures prices for U.S. core inflation. The proposed aggregator reduces the out-of-sample root mean squared error for 12-month-ahead inflation forecasts of the benchmark AR(1) model by 28 percent (20 percent) for the PCE (CPI) measure of core inflation. To avoid obfuscation of the sources of forecast ability, the model is intentionally kept simple, although extensions for improving and increasing the robustness of the forecast procedure are also discussed.