Robert J. Barbera and Jonathan H. Wright We’ve written two pieces recently on Treasury yields amid the COVID recovery. Wednesday’s release of the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee’s Survey of Economic Projections is an opportunity to review where ten yields are, and where they may be headed. The median FOMC participant projects a funds rate […]
Category: Fed
What did We Learn from Recent Monetary Policy Performance?
A growing chorus of commentators are now issuing warnings about additional Fed tightening in light of the flattening Treasury yield curve. Despite clear evidence that job growth in the U.S. is running well ahead of a sustainable pace, low wage and price inflation, for many suggest no need to firm overnight interest rates. Exhibits A […]
The slope of the yield curve and lessons from recent history
A downward sloping yield curve is widely seen as a harbinger of recessions, and indeed has an impressive track record. The yield curve inverted before the last two recessions and is likely to invert again within less than a year, which naturally raises fear of another recession. Much commentary of late has noted that yield […]
What will the FOMC be discussing next December?
The FOMC has communicated that it is likely to raise the federal funds rate 25 basis points in its meeting today; it would be a major shift in behavior if it didn’t. Thus, the main thing many folks are talking about is what the Fed will signal in the Survey of Economic Projections (SEP) and […]
What will the Fed do? Nov. 2017 edition
Ideally, if there has been no big news about the economy since the previous FOMC meeting, the FOMC should be back-page news. And maybe as part of “normalization” we are getting back to that: tomorrow’s FOMC announcement is likely to be a very sleepy event. Note: Let’s be clear that I’m talking about Wednesday’s FOMC […]
What the next Fed chair will do
Back in normal times, the following question would have seemed peculiar: Which Fed chair candidate would choose highly accommodative policy if a large fiscal stimulus hits an economy in which the unemployment rate is already at historic lows? The question becomes stranger when we add that the Republicans in power might prefer that Chair. What […]
Yellen for Fed Chair?
I received several comments regarding the post on Jay Powell, asking whether I was implicitly stating a preference for Powell over Janet Yellen. Nope. I clearly should have been less obtuse, but I meant only to be commenting on Powell, who had become a strong favorite according to the betting pundits. The Powell piece started […]
Powell for Fed chair?
According to the folks who bet on such things, Jerome (Jay) Powell is a heavy favorite to become the next Fed chair. I have no special insights into the likely pick, but I do have a pretty good sense of Powell. I was working as a special advisor to the Fed governors when Powell arrived […]
Mid-Summer Review: Mr. Phillips and Mr. Trump both Shooting Blanks
There are two parts to forecasting monetary policy: forecasting what picture the economy will present to the Fed, and forming a judgment about how the Fed will react to that picture. The first of these is pure forecasting—what will happen tomorrow? Given a macro forecast, the second mainly requires a view about the Fed’s ongoing […]
What will the Fed Do? June 2017 edition.
We’ve been reviewing those ‘5 things to watch for’ pieces that often precede FOMC meetings. Our conclusion is that even a Fed groupy is unlikely to find 5 notable things happening at any given FOMC. This is as it should be in an age of transparency. We’re trying a different approach. We’ll try to distill […]
Troubled Fed faces puzzling drop in inflation. And other fake news.
As a holiday sweet in Dec. 2015, we produced an Onion-style Fed watcher analysis of the coming FOMC. One key insight went roughly as follows: Our contacts suggest widespread support on the FOMC for permanently including in the FOMC statement the claim that inflation will run below target due to recent transitory factors. Not Onion […]
Q&A about Fed portfolio normalization
The best way to predict how the FOMC will react to evolving economic conditions, we at the CFE have been arguing, is to listen almost exclusively to communication on behalf of the consensus, and then to, as best as possible, take that communication at face value. As we’ve documented, this approach has had an excellent […]