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Discussion Paper
Putting the Current Oil Price Collapse into Historical Perspective
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in late January, oil prices have fallen sharply. In this post, we compare recent price declines with those seen in previous oil price collapses, focusing on the drivers of such episodes. In order to do that, we break oil price shocks down into demand and supply components, applying the methodology behind the New York Fed’s weekly Oil Price Dynamics Report.
Report
Financial amplification of foreign exchange risk premia
Theories of systemic risk suggest that financial intermediaries? balance-sheet constraints amplify fundamental shocks. We provide supporting evidence for such theories by decomposing the U.S. dollar risk premium into components associated with macroeconomic fundamentals and a component associated with financial intermediaries? balance sheets. Relative to the benchmark model with only macroeconomic state variables, balance sheets amplify the U.S. dollar risk premium. We discuss applications to systemic risk monitoring.
Discussion Paper
An Examination of U.S. Dollar Declines
Although the dollar strengthened somewhat recently, its level relative to the currencies of the United States’ main trading partners is nonetheless 11 percent lower than it was at the start of 2009. This represents one of the more pronounced periods of dollar weakness over the past two decades and consequently has garnered considerable attention from market participants and policymakers alike. In this post, we examine the role of market uncertainty and currency risk premia in the pace and size of episodes of dollar weakness since 1991. We find that the most recent bout of U.S. dollar ...
Discussion Paper
A New Barometer of Global Supply Chain Pressures
Supply chain disruptions have become a major challenge for the global economy since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Factory shutdowns (particularly in Asia) and widespread lockdowns and mobility restrictions have resulted in disruptions across logistics networks, increases in shipping costs, and longer delivery times. Several measures have been used to gauge these disruptions, although those measures tend to focus on selected dimensions of global supply chains. In this post, we propose a new gauge, the Global Supply Chain Pressure Index (GSCPI), which integrates a number of commonly used ...
Report
Parsimonious estimation with many instruments
We suggest a way to perform parsimonious instrumental variables estimation in the presence of many, and potentially weak, instruments. In contrast to standard methods, our approach yields consistent estimates when the set of instrumental variables complies with a factor structure. In this sense, our method is equivalent to instrumental variables estimation that is based on principal components. However, even if the factor structure is weak or nonexistent, our method, unlike the principal components approach, still yields consistent estimates. Indeed, simulations indicate that our approach ...
Report
Revisiting useful approaches to data-rich macroeconomic forecasting
This paper analyzes the properties of a number of data-rich methods that are widely used in macroeconomic forecasting, in particular principal components (PC) and Bayesian regressions, as well as a lesser-known alternative, partial least squares (PLS) regression. In the latter method, linear, orthogonal combinations of a large number of predictor variables are constructed such that the covariance between a target variable and these common components is maximized. Existing studies have focused on modelling the target variable as a function of a finite set of unobserved common factors that ...
Discussion Paper
Is Higher Financial Stress Lurking around the Corner for China?
Despite China’s tighter financial policies and the Evergrande troubles, Chinese financial stress measures have been remarkably stable around average levels. Chinese financial conditions, though, are affected by global markets, making it likely that low foreign financial stress conditions are blurring the state of Chinese financial markets. In this post, we parse out the domestic component of a Chinese financial stress measure to evaluate the downside risk to future economic activity.
Discussion Paper
How Easy Is It to Forecast Commodity Prices?
Over the last decade, unprecedented spikes and drops in commodity prices have been a recurrent source of concern to both policymakers and the general public. Given all the recent attention, have economists and analysts made any progress in their ability to predict movements in commodity prices? In this post, we find there is no easy answer. We consider different strategies to forecast near-term commodity price inflation, but find that no particular approach is systematically more accurate and robust. Additionally, the results warn against interpreting current forecasts of commodity prices ...
Discussion Paper
The Global Supply Side of Inflationary Pressures
U.S. inflation has surged as the economy recovers from the COVID-19 recession. This phenomenon has not been confined to the U.S. economy, as similar inflationary pressures have emerged in other advanced economies albeit not with the same intensity. In this post, we draw from the current international experiences to provide an assessment of the drivers of U.S. inflation. In particular, we exploit the link among different measures of inflation at the country level and a number of global supply side variables to uncover which common cross-country forces have been driving observed inflation. Our ...
Discussion Paper
Oil Prices, Global Demand Expectations, and Near-Term Global Inflation
Oil prices have increased by nearly 60 percent since the summer of 2020, coinciding with an upward trend in global inflation. If higher oil prices are the result of constrained supply, then this could pose some stagflation risks to the growth outlook—a concern reflected in a June Financial Times article, “Why OPEC Matters.” In this post, we utilize the demand and supply decomposition from the New York Fed’s Oil Price Dynamics Report to argue that most of the oil price increase over the past year or so has reflected improving global demand expectations. We then illustrate what these ...