Liftoff? And then…

Early December finds us asking the traditional question on the eve of the holidays: What will the Fed give us for interest rates next year? Holidays past might provide some guidance. The Fed’s policy projections going into the December FOMC last year showed a year-end 2015 median federal funds rate of about 1.5 percent, with […]


Unconventional Lessons for Unwinding Unconventional Policy, I: The Volcker Disinflation

The Fed is (data dependently) on the cusp of attempting to engineer something unprecedented—a relatively benign liftoff of short-term interest rates after an extended period with those rates near their lower bound. Many analysts have been carefully analyzing past tightening episodes hoping to understand the likely Fed behavior, and I am regularly asked what I […]


Dots …

Just before the release of the FOMC’s Survey of Economic Projections (SEP) in December, I posted a piece saying that the dots would reveal nothing and arguing that, by design, the dot plot is not likely to help us understand policy. My main critique is that the dots convey the range of opinions, but shed […]


Two big questions

Simple plots of recent GDP and inflation data highlight two profoundly important questions facing monetary policymakers in the United States. GDP is at a level several percentage points below reasonable estimates of its pre-crisis trajectory (Fig. 1):[1] Will we ever regain that lost output? Inflation had run well below the Fed’s objective for the two […]


Jobs, inflation, and growth in 2015

Recent readings for the U.S. economy are filled with contradictions. Non-farm payroll gains were quite strong. Unemployment fell to 5.7% from 6.1%, last September. Nonetheless, real GDP growth was soft, up only 2.6%. And retail sales were quite weak. Reconciling robust gains for employee hours and a low jobless rate with tepid increases for real […]


Capital controls for Russia?

“The main lesson from international experience is that controls on capital outflows can work—but only if they are associated with a credible policy plan addressing the underlying cause of the confidence crisis.” Olivier Jeanne, of the Center and Peterson Institute, has an interesting op-ed in the Dec. 23 Financial Times arguing that capital controls may […]


Patience and prices

Consensus expectations were off regarding the November estimate for U.S. CPI inflation released yesterday. The 0.3% fall for headline inflation was a larger drop than estimated by 82 of the 84 economists who ventured forth with an opinion in Bloomberg’s survey. No-one offered up a forecast of a greater fall than 0.3%. We suspect that […]


Of dots and (considerable) periods

In a recent post, I argued that the Bernanke and Yellen Fed’s have been striving for a ‘no tea leaves’ approach to policy communications. An astute JHU student responded, ‘How about those dots?’ Good students can be annoying that way. There is a sound reason for publishing the dot plot, but we should not expect […]


Today's CPI release: If you just squint, you'll see …

The FOMC minutes released yesterday and today’s CPI data release underscore a remarkable shift. Over the past five years, the state of the labor market has dominated monetary policy discussions, but for the first time since the crisis inflation is now taking center stage. All through the recovery, of course, inflation hawks have warned that […]


Hawks, Doves, and Tea Leaves

In its most recent policy statement, the FOMC removed the phrase, “there remains significant underutilization of labor resources” and substituted that the “underutilization of labor resources is gradually diminishing.” Fed watchers have pronounced this hawkish. I have a different reading, resting on my perception of two recent changes I perceive in Fed communications. Having been […]


Nice weather we're having? Seasons and jobs

When macroeconomic data such as today’s employment report are released, we often focus on seasonally adjusted numbers.  Seasonally adjusted employment numbers smooth through changes in employment that are judged to be part of some annual cycle such as the jump in retail employment every year as the Christmas buying season ramps up.  Of course, there […]


A Farewell to QE?

The FOMC has long communicated that, if something like its modal outlook played out, it would likely make one final $15 billion reduction in the pace of asset purchases at its October FOMC meeting, which is now taking place.  This would put an end to the purchase program known as QE-infinity.  In essence, we may […]