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Journal Article
Fed Communications and Inflation Expectations
Monetary policy surprises—changes in various interest rates around central bank communication events—reflect new information in monetary policy actions and communications. For the Federal Reserve, surprises around Federal Open Market Committee statements and post-meeting press conferences have, in recent years, often led to meaningful market surprises that capture policy news. Event-study analysis provides new market-based evidence of monetary policy transmission: Hawkish policy surprises lower market-based inflation expectations, while dovish surprises raise them, in line with standard ...
Journal Article
Bridging the Gap: Forecasting Interest Rates with Macro Trends
Interest rates are inherently difficult to predict, and the simple random walk benchmark has proven hard to beat. But macroeconomics can help, because the long-run trend in interest rates is driven by the trend in inflation and the equilibrium real interest rate. When forecasting rates several years into the future, substantial gains are possible by predicting that the gap between current interest rates and this long-run trend will close with increasing forecast horizon. This evidence suggests that accounting for macroeconomic trends is important for understanding, modeling, and forecasting ...
Journal Article
What caused the decline in long-term yields?
Long-term U.S. government bond yields have trended down for more than two decades, but identifying the source of this decline is difficult. A new methodology suggests that reductions in long-run expectations of inflation and inflation-adjusted interest rates have played a significant role in the secular decline in yields. In contrast, standard statistical finance methods appear to overemphasize the effects of lower risk premiums and reduced uncertainty about future inflation.
Journal Article
Optimal policy and market-based expectations
Financial market prices contain valuable information about investors? views regarding future interest rates, inflation, and other economic variables. However, such market-based expectations can be hard to interpret because changes in risk and liquidity premiums also affect asset prices. In practice, policymakers should be cautious in relying on the expectations information in market prices.
Journal Article
What moves the interest rate term structure?
To understand the effects of news on bond markets, it is instructive to look beyond individual maturities and consider the entire term structure of interest rates. For example, unexpected changes in monthly nonfarm payroll employment numbers cause large movements at short and medium maturities, but do not affect long-term interest rates. Inflation news affects the long end of the term structure. Monetary policy actions vary in their effects on interest rates, but cause volatility at all maturities, including distant forward rates.
Journal Article
Expectations for monetary policy liftoff
The Federal Reserve has indicated that it may raise the federal funds rate from its current value near zero in 2015. This forward policy guidance is broadly consistent with expectations from business surveys on the most likely timing for the funds rate liftoff. It also appears in line with estimates of policy liftoff from forward interest rates derived from Treasury yields. However, in interpreting forward rates, it is important to account for the zero lower bound on interest rates.
Journal Article
Options-based expectations of future policy rates
Forecasts of short-term interest rates that are based on futures rates in financial markets can be very misleading when the policy rate is near the zero lower bound. By contrast, options on future short-term interest rates can provide more accurate projections. Currently these options suggest that the federal funds rate?the Federal Reserve?s key monetary policy interest rate?is most likely to lift off from zero around mid-2015 and rise only slowly afterwards at a pace of about 1 percentage point per year.
Journal Article
A New Conundrum in the Bond Market?
When the Federal Reserve raises short-term interest rates, the rates on longer-term Treasuries are generally expected to rise. However, even though the Fed has raised short-term interest rates three times since December 2016 and started reducing its asset holdings, Treasury yields have dropped instead. This decoupling of short-term and long-term rates is reminiscent of the ?Greenspan conundrum? of 2004?05. This time, however, evidence suggests compelling explanations?a lower ?normal? interest rate, the risk of persistently low inflation, and fiscal and geopolitical uncertainty?may account for ...
Journal Article
Financial market outlook for inflation
Prices of special financial instruments called inflation derivatives can provide valuable insight into investors? views of future inflation. Projections from inflation swap rates suggest inflation will remain low for some time and return only slowly to levels consistent with the Federal Reserve?s notion of price stability. Inflation caps and floors give evidence that investors seem less uncertain about inflation forecasts than in recent years, and that they perceive a favorable inflation outcome as increasingly likely.
Journal Article
Signals from unconventional monetary policy
Federal Reserve announcements of future purchases of longer-term bonds may affect asset prices by changing market expectations of the future supply of targeted securities. Such announcements may also affect asset prices by signaling that the stance of conventional monetary policy is likely to remain loose for longer than previously anticipated. Research suggests that these signaling effects were a major contributor to the cumulative declines in Treasury security yields following the eight Fed announcements in 2008 and 2009 about its first round of large-scale asset purchases.