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Journal Article
FOMC Communication Spillovers: Is There a "Call-Out" Effect?
Foreign asset prices may react to FOMC communication that references specific countries, but the effects are minimal.
Journal Article
The Changing Investor Composition of U.S. Treasuries, Part 1: Foreign Treasury Sales Could Raise U.S. Yields
Although their market share has been falling steadily since 2010, foreign investors retain a large share of Treasuries outstanding. As a result, increased Treasury sales from this group could have substantial implications for yields. This Bulletin, the first in a two-part series, shows that a modest increase in liquidation among foreign investors could raise U.S. Treasury yields by 25 to 100 basis points. Even in the absence of outright sales, diminished purchasing of additional Treasury issuance is likely to drive up yields.
Journal Article
When Normalizing Monetary Policy, the Order of Operations Matters
As economic conditions in the United States continue to improve, the FOMC may consider normalizing monetary policy. Whether the FOMC reduces the balance sheet before raising the federal funds rate (or vice versa) may affect the shape of the yield curve, with consequences for financial institutions. Drawing lessons from the previous normalization in 2015–19, we conclude that normalizing the balance sheet before raising the funds rate might forestall yield curve inversion and, in turn, support economic stability.
Working Paper
Unconventional Monetary Policy, (A)Synchronicity and the Yield Curve
This paper examines international spillovers from unconventional monetary policy between the United States, the euro area, the United Kingdom and Japan, and assesses the influence of asynchronous policy normalization on the slope of the yield curve. Using high frequency futures data to identify monetary policy surprises and controlling for contemporaneous news, I find that spillovers increase during periods of unconventional monetary policy and strengthen during asynchronous policy normalization. Local projections suggest persistent spillovers from the Federal Reserve, whereas other ...
Journal Article
Labor Market Cooling Has Been Uneven Across Industries
The U.S. labor market has cooled over the last two years but remains healthy overall. However, an industry-specific version of the KC Fed’s Labor Market Conditions Indicators (LMCI) suggests pockets of tightness and weakness have appeared in a few industries. Tightness appears to be limited to less labor-intensive industries, limiting upside risk to inflation. Weakness, on the other hand, has appeared in the interest-rate-sensitive information industry, which may be vulnerable to further labor market cooling.
Working Paper
Foreign Reserve Management and U.S. Money Market Liquidity: A Cost of Exorbitant Privilege
We show theoretically and empirically that the dollar’s status as the global reserve currencycan lead to economically significant changes in U.S. money market liquidity. We develop amodel in which U.S. money market spreads respond to foreign central banks’ exchange-ratemanagement decisions. Foreign central banks remove liquidity from U.S. money markets andcause spreads to widen by selling Treasuries to supply liquidity to their financial systems.Our analysis focuses on the major oil exporting countries with fixed exchange rates becausetheir foreign-exchange market interventions are ...
Working Paper
Risk-on/Risk-off: Measuring Shifts in Investor Sentiment
A new, high frequency measure of investor sentiment outperforms similar measures in forecasting investment activity in emerging markets.
Journal Article
Unconventional Monetary Policy and International Interest Rate Spillovers
After the 2008 global financial crisis, advanced economies turned to unconventional monetary policies to provide additional monetary stimulus while short-term interest rates were constrained by their effective lower bound. However, the speed of economic recovery differed markedly among these economies, leading to differences in the timing and intensity of unconventional monetary policies across central banks. These differences may have generated “spillover effects” that undermined policy tightening in the United States after 2015.Karlye Dilts Stedman assesses whether monetary policies ...
Working Paper
Spillovers at the Extremes: The Macroprudential Stance and Vulnerability to the Global Financial Cycle
Evidence suggests that macroprudential policy has small and insignificant effects on the volume of portfolio flows. We show, however, that these minor effects mask very different relationships across the global financial cycle. A tighter ex-ante macroprudential stance amplifies the impact of global risk shocks on bond and equity flows—increasing outflows by significantly more during risk-off episodes and increasing inflows significantly more during risk on episodes. These amplification effects are more prominent at the “extremes,” especially for extreme risk-off periods, and are larger ...
Journal Article
The G-Spread Suggests Federal Reserve Restored Calm to Treasury Markets
In March, the coronavirus pandemic led to a sell-off in Treasury markets and a subsequent period of financial stress. I use one measure of Treasury market pressure, the G-spread, to gauge how liquidity in Treasury markets changed in response to the pandemic and the Federal Reserve’s interventions. I find that timely Federal Reserve interventions restored calm to the Treasury market, and that these interventions stand out in speed and scale compared with interventions in the early days of the 2007–08 financial crisis.