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Working Paper
Gauging the uncertainty of the economic outlook from historical forecasting errors
Participants in meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) regularly produce individual projections of real activity and inflation that are published in summary form. These summaries indicate participants' views about the most likely course for the macroeconomy but, by themselves, are not enough to gauge the full range of possible outcomes -- that is, the uncertainty surrounding the outlook. To this end, FOMC participants will now provide qualitative assessments of how they view the degree of current uncertainty relative to that which prevailed on average in the past. This paper ...
Conference Paper
Introduction
Working Paper
Gauging the Ability of the FOMC to Respond to Future Recessions
Current forecasts suggest that the federal funds rate in the future is likely to level out at a rather low level by historical standards. If so, then the FOMC will have less ability than in the past to cut short-term interest rates in response to a future recession, suggesting a risk that economic downturns could turn out to be more severe as a result. However, simulations of the FRB/US model of a severe recession suggest that large-scale asset purchases and forward guidance about the future path of the federal funds rate should be able to provide enough additional accommodation to fully ...
Working Paper
The Macroeconomic Effects of the Federal Reserve's Unconventional Monetary Policies
After reaching the effective lower bound for the federal funds rate in late 2008, the Federal Reserve turned to two unconventional policy tools--quantitative easing and increasingly explicit and forward-leaning guidance for the future path of the federal funds rate--in order to provide additional monetary policy accommodation. We use survey data from the Blue Chip Economic Indicators to infer changes in private-sector perceptions of the implicit interest rate rule that the Federal Reserve would use following liftoff from the effective lower bound. Using our estimates of the changes over time ...
Working Paper
Expectations formation and the effectiveness of strategies for limiting the consequences of the zero bound on interest rates
We use simulations of the Federal Reserve's FRB/US model to examine the efficacy of a number of proposals for reducing the consequences of the zero bound on nominal interest rates. Among the proposals are: a more aggressive monetary policy; promises to make up any shortfall in monetary ease during the zero-bound period by keeping interest rates lower in the future; and the adoption of a price-level target. We consider two assumptions about expectations formation. One assumption is fully model-consistent expectations (MCE)--a reasonable assumption when a policy has been in place for some time, ...
Working Paper
Gauging the Uncertainty of the Economic Outlook Using Historical Forecasting Errors : The Federal Reserve's Approach
Since November 2007, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the U.S. Federal Reserve has regularly published participants? qualitative assessments of the uncertainty attending their individual forecasts of real activity and inflation, expressed relative to that seen on average in the past. The benchmarks used for these historical comparisons are the average root mean squared forecast errors (RMSEs) made by various private and government forecasters over the past twenty years. This paper documents how these benchmarks are constructed and discusses some of their properties. We draw several ...
Journal Article
Aggregate disturbances, monetary policy, and the macroeconomy: the FRB/US perspective
The FRB/US macroeconometric model of the U.S. economy was created at the Federal Reserve Board for use in policy analysis and forecasting. This article begins with an examination of the model's characterization of the monetary transmission mechanism -- the chain of relationships describing how monetary policy actions influence financial markets and, in turn, output and inflation. The quantitative nature of this mechanism is illustrated by estimates of the effect of movements in interest rates and other factors on spending in different sectors and by simulations of the effect of a change in ...
Working Paper
Have we underestimated the likelihood and severity of zero lower bound events?
Before the recent recession, the consensus among researchers was that the zero lower bound (ZLB) probably would not pose a significant problem for monetary policy as long as a central bank aimed for an inflation rate of about 2 percent; some have even argued that an appreciably lower target inflation rate would pose no problems. This paper reexamines this consensus in the wake of the financial crisis, which has seen policy rates at their effective lower bound for more than two years in the United States and Japan and near zero in many other countries. We conduct our analysis using a set of ...