That's Interesting
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How Risky is Australian Household Debt?
25th August, 2020Household debt levels have increased considerably over the past 30 years, both in Australia and elsewhere. In Australia, and other countries with relatively high household indebtedness, this is consistently cited as a key risk to financial and macroeconomic stability.
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No Payment, No Problem: Bizarre New World of Consumer Debt
10th August, 2020The New York Fed released a doozie of a household credit report. It summarized what individual lenders have been reporting about their own practices: If you can’t make the payments on your mortgage, auto loan, credit card debt, or student loan, just ask for a deferral or forbearance, and you won’t have to make the payments, and the loan won’t count as delinquent if it wasn’t delinquent before. And even if it was delinquent before, you can “cure” a delinquency by getting the loan deferred and modified. No payment, no problem.
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Recent COVID-19 Spike and U.S. Employment Slowdown
05th August, 2020The coronavirus pandemic continues to affect employment across the United States. In a previous blog post, we explored the idea of forecasting weekly changes in employment using data from Homebase, a data set that reports changes in employment daily. In this article, we discuss our updated forecasts for employment using this technique and investigate whether the recent changes in the labor market are related to the spike in COVID-19 cases across the country since June.
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FRBSF – The Fog of Numbers
20th July, 2020In times of economic turbulence, revisions to GDP data can be sizable, which makes conducting economic policy in real time during a crisis more difficult. A simple model based on Okun’s law can help refine the advance data release of real GDP growth to provide an improved reading of economic activity in real time.
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FRBSF – The Rising Cost of Climate Change: Evidence from the Bond Market
20th July, 2020The level of the social discount rate (SDR) is a crucial factor for evaluating the costs of climate change. This paper demonstrates that the equilibrium or steady-state real interest rate is the fundamental anchor for market-based SDRs.
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An Unemployment Crisis after the Onset of COVID-19
27th May, 2020The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the U.S. labor market, with massive job losses and a spike in unemployment to its highest level since the Great Depression. How long unemployment will remain at crisis levels is highly uncertain and will depend on the speed and success of coronavirus containment measures.
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