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Gazing at r-star: Gauging U.S. monetary policy via the natural rate of interest
While estimating r-star is fraught with difficulty, the latest evidence suggests U.S. monetary policy likely turned restrictive at the start of 2023, after the Federal Reserve started raising rates in March 2022.
Briefing
Can China Avoid a Liquidity-Trap Recession? Some Unintended Consequences of Macroprudential Policies
A liquidity trap is a nightmare for central banks because the zero lower bound constrains them from further reducing the nominal interest rate to stimulate the economy. The nightmare can be long: For example, Japan — formerly the world's second-largest economy after the U.S. — has been battling its liquidity trap since its real-estate bubble burst in 1990. Recently, some commentators have argued that a liquidity trap is imminent in China — currently the world's second-largest economy — pointing to signs such as deposit surge (despite declining interest rates), mounting deflationary ...
Briefing
Can Trade Help Mitigate Risk From Weather Disruptions?
As weather-related disruptions become more frequent, firms face increasing risks to their supply chains. To safeguard against these shocks, businesses are adopting strategies to enhance resiliency and ensure that disruptions to key suppliers don't halt operations. In the 2024 working paper by several authors of this article (Juanma, Gaurav, Nicolas and Nitya), we explore how Indian firms mitigate risks from weather events by diversifying their input sources across multiple regions.Using detailed transaction data from Indian firms, we highlight multisourcing as a crucial risk-management ...
Journal Article
Mexico’s productivity woes limit nearshoring, growth potential
Industrial policy reform, nearshoring and a deeper Mexico–U.S. partnership could provide tailwinds for Mexican economic growth. Whether Mexico can harness the full potential of such transformative change is less clear.
Mexico seeks to solidify rank as top U.S. trade partner, push further past China
Mexico's emergence followed fractious U.S. relations with China, which had moved past Canada to claim the top trading spot in 2014. The dynamic changed in 2018 when the U.S. imposed tariffs on China’s goods and with subsequent pandemic-era supply-chain disruptions that altered international trade and investment flows worldwide.
Blame higher U.S. equity prices for recent moves in U.S. external liabilities
The U.S. net foreign asset position—the value of foreign assets held by U.S. residents minus the value of U.S. assets held by foreign residents—has fallen sharply since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.
Emerging-market countries insulate themselves from Fed rate hikes
Earlier episodes of sizable Fed tightening preceded destabilizing currency devaluations in emerging markets, precipitating sovereign debt and banking crises in many of those economies
Korea, Japan growth experiences suggest China’s economy to slow in next 20 years
The Chinese economy has grown at an unprecedented pace since the 1980s. However, the pace of growth is likely to slow as China’s economy matures because of its demographic structure and its increasing proximity to economic and technological frontiers.
Disparate supply-side forces gave U.S. economy an edge
The U.S. economy boasts robust growth and slowing inflation despite the highest interest rates in two decades. Such performance isn’t common globally, especially among other advanced economies, revealing crucial differences in the fundamental factors driving inflation and growth.
Decentralized finance proposed as alternative to traditional financial services
DeFi applications allow users to directly interact with each other to borrow, lend, insure and exchange digital assets without centralized intermediaries, such as banks and custodial exchanges.