There are actually two parts to examining the orthodox treatment of the output gap. The first is the review, looking backward to trace how we got to this state. The second is looking forward trying to figure what it means to be here. One final rearward assessment is required so as to frame how we view what comes next. As [...]
Janet Yellen was apparently “hawkish” again in her latest speech, though the reasons why she may have been continue to elude the media and many markets. In many ways, she doesn’t even know, a fact that she expressed several months ago to likewise very little appreciation. The FOMC may or may not raise rates in the next meeting or the [...]
On February 8, 2007, exactly one decade ago today, shares of New Century Financial, a former darling of not just Wall Street but the mainstream, plunged 37% in panicky trading. The day before, February 7, New Century reported expectations for loan production for 2007 to be 20% below 2006 levels. But the real bombshell was the reasoning for that guidance, [...]
The most basic link in finance is that between risk and reward. Just like alchemists who once sought a path to gold from lead, a great deal of modern finance was built around finding a shortcut between them. Discovering the great asymmetry where risks would be low but rewards sky high was the Holy Grail of later 20th century mathematics. [...]
In addition to all the myriad indications of a serious labor market slowdown last year, despite the fact that the unemployment rate has been 5% or less since September 2015, and in all likelihood was that again in January, there is no indication of any acceleration in wages or earnings. None. The labor market just is not as it is [...]
Productivity in Q4 2016 was estimated to have been 1.29%, suggesting that last quarter was merely bad rather than unusually bad as it had been just before. Productivity during what was the near-recession in the three quarters including and after Q4 2015 was negative in all three. That would suggest, strongly, why labor market statistics have uniformly described a rather [...]
In the aftermath of the “rate hike” in December, there was a rush to quantify, as far as expectations of political considerations may be attainable in such format, just how much the Fed would further “hike” in 2017 as a distillation of how good they figured the economy to be. As overall “reflation”, however, that was more of a media [...]
The release of the 2011 FOMC transcripts has provided some useful clarity on the thinking of Federal Reserve officials. Unlike in 2008, policymakers were a little better acquainted with wholesale money and its possible points of failure. They never did solve or even identify all of them, of course, but the repo market in particular seems to have finally been [...]
The Federal Reserve in early 2012 altered longstanding monetary policy. In January that year, the FOMC had voted to make explicit what everyone already knew, that it considered 2% inflation to be the definition of “stable” consumer prices, casting off one of the last vestiges of 1980’s era regimes where central bankers felt silence was the best course. It had [...]
For the first time since 2014, the CPI was above 2% in December. Unlike the PCE Deflator, the CPI has been above 2% on other occasions after the 2012 slowdown, notably in mid-2014 when policymakers were making the same extrapolations as to its meaning. The inflation index had been as high as 2.13% in May 2014, before the economy of [...]
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