On September 14, I had the opportunity to present a guest lecture to Professor Rich Clarida’s Columbia SIPA course on Global Monetary Policy in the 21st Century. My lecture was entitled, How Aggressively Did the Fed Stabilize the Economy Pre-ZLB? (Here’s a link to the slides.) My talk looked into how aggressively the Fed acted … Continue reading Guest lecture: How Aggressively Did the Fed Stabilize the Economy Pre-ZLB?→| John Roberts Macroeconomics
| John Roberts Macroeconomics
On March 30, I participated in a very stimulating conference hosted by Kenyon College entitled What’s My Dollar Worth? Inflation’s Causes, Consequences and Cures. The conference included speakers with a broad range of views on the causes of recent high inflation and what policy can do about it. My own contribution compared the current situation … Continue reading Expectations, Then and Now→| John Roberts Macroeconomics
Since 2020, real wages have fallen far short of their pre-Covid trend. In a new working paper, Steve Kamin and I ask, Will a Recovery in Real Wages Obstruct Progress toward Disinflation? Here’s the abstract from the paper, along with a key figure: Many observers, including officials at the Federal Reserve, have focused on the … Continue reading Would a Recovery in Real Wages Make the Fed’s Job Harder?→| John Roberts Macroeconomics
The economy in 2022 was remarkably resilient to higher interest rates and tighter financial conditions. Although residential construction fell, consumer spending continued to expand. The labor mark…| John Roberts Macroeconomics
Observations about monetary policy and the economy| John Roberts Macroeconomics
The outlook in the Summary of Economic Projections for December 2021 is sanguine: The median of the projections suggests that inflation will come down substantially by the end of 2022, and that int…| John Roberts Macroeconomics
Following up on a couple of previous posts (here and here), I take a look at the forecasts in the FOMC’s September 2022 Summary of Economic Projections (SEP) through the lens of a simple macroecono…| John Roberts Macroeconomics
My blog post from last March, How Tight Is the Labor Market?, argued that the unusually high level of job openings meant that the natural rate of unemployment was likely higher than pre-Covid. Rela…| John Roberts Macroeconomics
Updated 9/1/2022 to clarify that the FOMC will monitor the inflation process broadly, and not just a single measure such as core PCE inflation. The Fed is currently in a tightening cycle. When will…| John Roberts Macroeconomics
Over the coming year, the Fed will be reviewing its framework for setting monetary policy. In their previous policy review, which wrapped up in August 2020, the Fed adjusted its framework to address the low-interest-rate environment of the 2010s. The past few years have of course presented the different set of challenges related to high … Continue reading Toward a more robust Federal Reserve policy framework→| John Roberts Macroeconomics
I have a new note, co-authored with fellow Fed alum Steve Kamin, that asks “How Will the Interaction of Wages and Prices Play Out in the Last Mile of Disinflation?” We estimate a model of wage-pric…| John Roberts Macroeconomics
This post is the latest of a series that uses a small-scale macroeconomic model to interpret the latest edition of the Federal Open Market Committee’s Summary of Economic Projections; here’s a link…| John Roberts Macroeconomics
As in posts earlier this year (here’s a link to the previous one), I interpret the outlook in the FOMC’s latest Summary of Economic Projections (SEP) through the lens of a simple macroeconomic mode…| John Roberts Macroeconomics
If inflation comes down more quickly than the Fed currently anticipates, the Fed would likely cut interest rates sooner—sooner, for example, than in their most-recent economic projections, when the…| John Roberts Macroeconomics
Inflation is currently much higher than it was pre-Covid: as of August 2022, the twelve-month change in the prices of personal consumption expenditures excluding food and energy (core PCE) was 4.9&…| John Roberts Macroeconomics
