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Speech
The U.S. economic outlook and the implications for monetary policy: remarks at the ABNY breakfast with William C. Dudley, the Roosevelt Hotel, New York City
Remarks at the ABNY breakfast with William C. Dudley, the Roosevelt Hotel, New York City.
Journal Article
Historical Patterns around Financial Crises
Long-run historical data for advanced economies provide evidence to help policymakers understand specific conditions that typically lead up to financial crises. Recent research finds that rapid growth in the top income share and prolonged low labor productivity growth are robust predictors of crises. Moreover, if crises are preceded by these developments, then the subsequent recoveries are slower. This recent empirical evidence suggests that financial crises are not simply random events but are typically preceded by a prolonged buildup of macrofinancial imbalances.
Discussion Paper
Discretionary Services Spending Has Finally Made It Back (to 2007)
The current economic expansion is now the third-longest expansion in U.S. history (based on National Bureau of Economic Research [NBER] dating of U.S. business cycles). Even so, average growth in this expansion—a 2.1 percent annual rate—has been extraordinarily weak. In this post, I return to previous analysis on a specific portion of consumer spending—household discretionary services expenditures—that has displayed unusual weakness in the current expansion (see this post for the definition of discretionary versus nondiscretionary services expenditures, and these posts from 2012 and ...
Journal Article
Have We Entered an Era of High Productivity Growth?
Labor productivity gains over the past three years helped the U.S. economy expand steadily, even with near-zero employment growth. Combined with substantially increased business investment in artificial intelligence technology, these conditions have raised the question of whether the economy is entering a high-productivity growth period. Two well-known productivity measures do not yet provide strong evidence of this shift. However, recent patterns resemble the mixed signals during the early stages of the 1990s productivity surge before a sustained high-growth period materialized, giving ...
Speech
How Should the Promise of Higher Productivity Growth Change the Reality of Monetary Policy Today?
At the Reykjavík Economic Conference 2026, St. Louis Fed President Alberto Musalem delivered a keynote address, “How Should the Promise of Higher Productivity Growth Change the Reality of Monetary Policy Today?” He also participated in a Q&A moderated by Claire Jones of the Financial Times. The conference in Reykjavík, Iceland, was hosted by the Central Bank of Iceland and the Center for International Macroeconomics at Northwestern University.
Speech
Productivity Growth and the Challenge of Real-Time Policymaking
Remarks at the Reykjavík Economic Conference, Reykjavík, Iceland.
Speech
No Man Is an Island
Remarks at 2019 Asia Economic Policy Conference, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, San Francisco, California.
Working Paper
The UK Productivity “Puzzle” in an International Comparative Perspective
The UK’s slow productivity growth since 2007 has been referred to as a “puzzle”, as if it were a particularly UK-specific challenge. In this paper, we highlight how the United States and northern Europe experienced very similar slowdowns. The common slowdown in productivity growth was a slowdown in total factor productivity (TFP) growth; we find little evidence that capital deepening was an important independent factor. From a conditional-convergence perspective, most of the UK slowdown follows from the slowdown at the U.S. frontier. From the mid-1980s to 2007, the UK’s relative ...
Speech
The economic outlook: the ‘new normal’ is now: remarks at The Economic Club of New York, New York City
Remarks at The Economic Club of New York, New York City.
Does Worker Scarcity Spur Investment, Automation and Productivity? Evidence from Earnings Calls
An analysis suggests labor issues like higher wages and hiring difficulties have prompted some firms to invest in automation, leading to productivity growth.