The Center for Financial Economics advances knowledge of the economic forces driving the financial system through research and teaching. Our work explores the fundamental economics of our current system and the dynamic tensions that will spur change.
To an economist looking at the government CPI report that came out Tuesday, it is clear that inflation is receding. Over the past 12 months, the overall CPI is up 3.2%, far below the peak annual rate of 9.1% seen in the summer of 2022. The co-called “core” rate, which excludes volatile food and energy […]
By Alessandro Rebucci and Sinem Yagmur Toraman Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, CEPR and NBER Johns Hopkins University, Economics Department On Wednesday September 28, 2022 the Bank of England announced a short-term Gilt purchase program to bail out the UK pension system. The 30-year yield tanked, UK pension funds were rescued, and, quite surprisingly, the […]
Job growth in the United States was distinctly uneven for decades before the Pandemic hit, a fact that was emphasized this week when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a list of when each county in the United States reached its highest employment, based on data from 1975 to 2020. It showed that only 27% […]
Herbert Stein, former Chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisors for R.M. Nixon, reminded his colleagues that “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop”. History is littered with speculators who went broke, betting against clearly unsustainable trends but forgetting that forever is a long time. Which brings us to the Chinese Real […]
Over the last 12 months, inflation has increased 5.4 percent in the US. Stoked by a leap for energy prices and a hefty 4.3 percent rise for core inflation. Throughout most of U.S. post-war history core goods price increases, on average rose at a much slower pace than services prices. Not so over the past […]
The Pandemic recession lasted two months, the National Bureau of Economic Research decided this week—more than a year after the supposed end of the recession in April 2020. That is the shortest recession ever, according to the NBER, which has a list of 34 recessions going back to 1857. But this recession made up for […]