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Speech
Remarks on the Economic Outlook and Monetary Policy
St. Louis Fed President Alberto Musalem shared his views on the U.S. economy and monetary policy at the 41st annual National Association for Business Economics (NABE) Economic Policy Conference in Washington, D.C. He gave a speech, “Remarks on the Economic Outlook and Monetary Policy,” and participated in a moderated Q&A.
Discussion Paper
Changing Risk-Return Profiles
Are stock returns predictable? This question is a perennially popular subject of debate. In this post, we highlight some results from our recent working paper, where we investigate the matter. Rather than focusing on a single object like the forecasted mean or median, we look at the entire distribution of stock returns and find that the realized volatility of stock returns, especially financial sector stock returns, has strong predictive content for the future distribution of stock returns. This is a robust feature of the data since all of our results are obtained with real-time analyses ...
Speech
Monetary Policy in Times of Financial Stress
Remarks by Charles L. Evans President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago New York Association for Business Economics Harvard Club New York, New York
Working Paper
Corporate Bond Market Distress
We link bond market functioning to future economic activity through a new measure, the Corporate Bond Market Distress Index (CMDI). The CMDI coalesces metrics from primary and secondary markets in real time, offering a unified measure to capture access to debt capital markets. The index correctly identifies periods of distress and predicts future realizations of commonly used measures of market functioning, while the converse is not the case. We show that disruptions in access to corporate bond markets have an economically material, statistically significant impact on the real economy, even ...
Report
Monetary policy and financial conditions: a cross-country study
Loose financial conditions forecast high output growth and low output volatility up to six quarters into the future, generating time-varying downside risk to the output gap, which we measure by GDP-at-Risk (GaR). This finding is robust across countries, conditioning variables, and time periods. We study the implications for monetary policy in a reduced-form New Keynesian model with financial intermediaries that are subject to a Value at Risk (VaR) constraint. Optimal monetary policy depends on the magnitude of downside risk to GDP, as it impacts the consumption-savings decision via the Euler ...
Speech
Rising to the Challenge: Central Banking, Financial Markets, and the Pandemic
Remarks at the 16th Meeting of the Financial Research Advisory Committee for the Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (delivered via videoconference).
Report
The Federal Reserve and market confidence
We discover a novel monetary policy shock that has a widespread impact on aggregate financial conditions and market confidence. Our shock can be summarized by the response of long-horizon yields to Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements; not only is it orthogonal to changes in the near-term path of policy rates, but it also explains more than half of the abnormal variation in the yield curve on announcement days. We find that our shock is positively related to changes in real interest rates and market volatility, and negatively related to market returns and mortgage issuance, ...
Discussion Paper
How Does U.S. Monetary Policy Affect Emerging Market Economies?
The question of how U.S. monetary policy affects foreign economies has received renewed interest in recent years. The bulk of the empirical evidence points to sizable effects, especially on emerging market economies (EMEs). A key theme in the literature is that these spillovers operate largely through financial channels—that is, the effects of a U.S. policy tightening manifest themselves abroad via declines in international risky asset prices, tighter financial conditions, and capital outflows. This so-called Global Financial Cycle has been shown to affect EMEs more forcefully than advanced ...
Speech
Financial conditions and the monetary policy outlook
Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan delivered these remarks before the 65th National Association for Business Economics Annual Meeting in Dallas, Texas.
Report
Forecasting Macroeconomic Risks
We construct risks around consensus forecasts of real GDP growth, unemployment, and inflation. We find that risks are time-varying, asymmetric, and partly predictable. Tight financial conditions forecast downside growth risk, upside unemployment risk, and increased uncertainty around the inflation forecast. Growth vulnerability arises as the conditional mean and conditional variance of GDP growth are negatively correlated: downside risks are driven by lower mean and higher variance when financial conditions tighten. Similarly, employment vulnerability arises as the conditional mean and ...