Reports

“The Committee seeks to achieve maximum employment and inflation at the rate of 2 percent over the longer run. In support of these goals, the Committee decided to maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 5 to 5-1/4 percent. Holding the target range steady at this meeting allows the Committee to assess…

“The index for all items less food and energy rose 0.4 percent in May, as it did in April and March. Indexes which increased in May include shelter, used cars and trucks, motor vehicle insurance, apparel, and personal care. The index for household furnishings and operations and the index for airline fares were among those…

“Major boom-bust cycles exhibit large positive productivity shocks followed by sharp, equally large reversals in productivity. We present a model in which news of a future productivity boom in an innovative sector immediately relaxes borrowing constraints, leading to a credit-filled boom. However, the expansion of credit is not sustainable and requires a contraction of credit…

“This paper builds a framework to analyze how private and social optima diverge when a monopolist offers privacy-valuing households a digital payment system that collects data on their habits but can help them signal their creditworthiness to lenders. We find that the monopoly uses its pole position to play off both households and lenders against…

“CBO’s projection of the deficit this year is subject to an unusually high degree of uncertainty. That uncertainty has increased since the updated projections were finalized in late March, in part because of new information. In particular, revenue collections through April of this year were lower than the agency projected. CBO’s projection of outlays for…

“In practice, the boundaries between the different scenarios are fuzzy. Uncertainty about the health of the financial system and its resilience to monetary tightening will inevitably complicate central banks’ decision processes. However, through the lens of our proposed taxonomy, the recent events in Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States suggest that the forceful…

“The fiscal and monetary policies adopted in the “war” on COVID-19 were indeed like past wars. Sharp increases in government spending with substantial monetary accommodation promoted a rapid recovery from the severe, but brief, recession in the second and third quarters of 2020. However, as in past wars, those fiscal and monetary policies also contributed…

“In conclusion, the US government had $21.4 trillion in outstanding US Treasury debt as of December 2022. Given large increases to interest rates over the past year, we esti­mate that it will cost the US government an additional $98 billion to pay interest on their debt in 2023. This estimate is close to those made…