Reports

“Can you guess the most common first names on the rosters? Last names? Leading states of birth? What about height and weight?” “And some families and hometowns will be hyper focused on the big game like the Kelce family from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, which has two brothers on opposing teams: Jason plays for the Eagles and…

“So… is macroeconomic news driving Bitcoin? In this post, we conduct a systematic analysis of the impact of macroeconomic and monetary policy news on Bitcoin’s price. In contrast to exchange rates and stocks, Bitcoin is largely unresponsive to macro news. More puzzling is the result that Bitcoin does not also react to monetary policy surprises.…

“Several indicators suggest that household spending started to dip at the end of 2022. In December, retail sales — which are heavily skewed toward goods — declined 1.1 percent monthly after dropping 1 percent in November. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) — which capture both goods and services — fell 0.2 percent monthly following a 0.1…

“Monetary policymaking requires complex real-time judgments. For that reason, in every advanced economy except Canada, monetary policy is delegated to a committee of experts rather than to a single decision-maker. In practice, however, decision-making has been impaired by the pitfalls of groupthink, tokenism, and marginalization of dissenting views. Indeed, central bank governance has not kept…

“The Federal Reserve has significantly tightened monetary policy over the past year, raising concerns that a higher unemployment rate will follow. Some economists have argued that because the job vacancy rate has been well above its pre-pandemic level, there is plenty of room for vacancies to fall before the unemployment rate must rise. This would…

“If decentralized finance (DeFi) continues to grow in size and scope, and if it continues to lack the guardrails that exist for traditional finance, then it could become a threat to financial stability. This blog post summarizes three channels through which threats could emerge in the DeFi market.” “1. Effects from Price Declines of Digital…

“Current increases in the federal funds rate are expected to reverse a historically large negative real funds rate gap at the beginning of the cycle. Successfully closing the real funds rate gap will hinge on substantially reducing the inflation rate. Relative to history, both the size and the speed of tightening in Treasury bonds and…

“The U.S. Treasury market is one of the most liquid financial markets in the world, and Treasury bonds have long been considered a safe haven for global investors. It is often believed that Treasury bonds earn a “convenience yield,” in the sense that investors are willing to accept a lower yield on them compared to…

“Once considered “unconventional,” balance sheet policies have become an integral part of the toolkit of many central banks. Increased reliance on balance sheet policies reflects in part a decline in the neutral level of interest rates, which limits central banks’ ability to cut their policy rates to support the economy during downturns, and many observers…

“Despite unprecedented disruptions to the labor market during the 2020 pandemic recession, workers displaced during that period experienced better employment and earnings outcomes than workers displaced during previous recessions. We find that the sharp recovery in aggregate labor market conditions after the pandemic recession accounts for these differences. Our regression analysis suggests that the industry…