Search Results
Working Paper
Monetary Tightening, Inflation Drivers and Financial Stress
The paper explores the state–dependent effects of a monetary tightening on financial stress, focusing on a novel dimension: the nature of supply versus demand inflation at the time of policy rate hikes. We use local projections to estimate the effect of high frequency identified monetary policy surprises on a variety of financial stress measures, differentiating the effects based on whether inflation is supply–driven (e.g. due to adverse supply or cost–push shocks) or demand–driven (e.g. due to positive demand factors). We find that financial stress flares up after a policy rate hike ...
Journal Article
Tightening Monetary Policy and Patterns of Consumption
An analysis examines the behavior of personal consumption expenditures during five episodes of monetary policy tightening since 1990.
Discussion Paper
What’s New with Corporate Leverage?
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) started increasing rates on March 16, 2022, and after the January 31–February 1, 2023, FOMC meeting, the lower bound of the target range of the federal funds rate had reached 4.50 percent, a level last registered in November 2007. Such a rapid rates increase could pass through to higher funding costs for U.S. corporations. In this post, we examine how corporate leverage and bond market debt have evolved over the course of the current tightening cycle and compare the current experience to that during the previous three tightening cycles.
Discussion Paper
Look Out for Outlook-at-Risk
The timely characterization of risks to the economic outlook plays an important role in both economic policy and private sector decisions. In a February 2023 Liberty Street Economics post, we introduced the concept of “Outlook-at-Risk”—that is, the downside risk to real activity and two-sided risks to inflation. Today we are launching Outlook-at-Risk as a regularly updated data product, with new readings for the conditional distributions of real GDP growth, the unemployment rate, and inflation to be published each month. In this post, we use the data on conditional distributions to ...
Gauging the Fed’s Current Tightening Actions: A Historical Perspective
In 2022, the Fed started its current tightening cycle. How does it compare with other cycles in the past 40 years in terms of the magnitude of policy rate hikes?
Journal Article
Consumer Credit Cards Show Few Signs of Financial Stress
Since monetary policy tightening began in March 2022, interest rates have risen across a range of consumer financial products, including credit cards. However, the consumer credit market shows little sign of financial stress as of September 2024. While credit card delinquency rates have increased among subprime borrowers, internal bank assessments suggest that subprime default risks remain historically low.
Journal Article
The Volcker Tightening Cycle: Explaining the 1982 Course Reversal
This article studies the factors that led former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to stop and then reverse course in the most famous monetary tightening cycle in U.S. history. I explain how the Fed began cutting its policy rate target, thus ending the tightening cycle, in July of 1982. Although the Fed had gained some ground in its fight against inflation, in mid-1982, inflation was running above 7 percent, well above the 2 percent inflation rate that the U.S. enjoyed before the Great Inflation. Beyond the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) partial success at taming inflation, I ...