The Committee currently judges that there is sufficient underlying strength in the broader economy to support ongoing improvement in labor market conditions. In light of the cumulative progress toward maximum employment and the improvement in the outlook for labor market conditions since the inception of the current asset purchase program, the Committee decided to make … Continue reading
Yellen, speaking at the Fed’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, last week, again cited low wage growth as evidence that the labor market is weaker than the 6.2 percent unemployment rate suggests and that interest rates should therefore stay low. And then she proceeded to cite reasons to be wary of that proposition. Among … Continue reading
A paper written by two staff members of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta tried to quantify what all the Fed’s new money creation and related measures have accomplished. They conclude that unemployment today would be 0.13% higher without the radical measures and 1.0% higher if nothing at all had been done. Chosen excerpts by … Continue reading
U.S. employers are having trouble finding workers with the needed skills in science, technology, engineering and math, a top Federal Reserve official said on Monday. “We are seeing a mismatch of skills in the workforce and the jobs that are being created,” Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser said of the so-called STEM-trained workers who are … Continue reading
The January 2012 statement of long-run monetary policy strategy clearly expresses the FOMC’s policy intentions: It states that the FOMC’s explicit inflation objective is 2 percent for the price index for personal consumption expenditures (PCE) in the long run and that maximum employment is associated with a sustainable unemployment rate that properly reflects structural developments … Continue reading
Conditions in the labor market have continued to improve. The unemployment rate was 6.3 percent in April, about 1-1/4 percentage points below where it was a year ago. Moreover, gains in payroll employment averaged nearly 200,000 jobs per month over the past year. During the economic recovery so far, payroll employment has increased by about … Continue reading
t’s too soon for the Federal Reserve to begin thinking about raising interest rates despite a strengthening U.S. economy, Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher said on Sunday. Mr. Fisher, a self-described inflation hawk who opposed the central bank’s latest round of bond purchases, said the weakness in first quarter U.S. economic growth, which nearly stalled … Continue reading
In the years following 2009, long-term unemployment has been very elevated while inflation has fallen only moderately, raising the question of whether the long-term unemployed exert less downward pressure on prices than the short-term unemployed, perhaps because such potential workers are disconnected from the labor market. However, empirical evidence is mixed. This analysis demonstrates that … Continue reading
“The larger the shortfall of employment or inflation from their respective objectives, and the slower the projected progress toward those objectives, the longer the current target range for the federal funds rate is likely to be maintained,” Yellen said today to the Economic Club of New York. The gap, in both cases, is large, with … Continue reading
Janet Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, devoted more than an hour last week talking by telephone with three Chicago area residents struggling to find jobs. On Monday, she made their stories the centerpiece of the first public speech in her new job, delivering a strong statement about her concern over unemployment, her conviction that the … Continue reading
Ryan Avent, having exhausted his conventional analysis of the Fed’s 2008 transcripts, turns today to a more analytical approach: counting words. I think others have already made this point without numbers, but Avent’s most powerful finding is that the Fed cares way more about inflation than it does about unemployment: There is only one winner … Continue reading
The Fed’s reliance on the unemployment rate for determining when to pull back on bond purchases may prove troublesome. That’s because statistics on the supply of labor are notoriously tricky to evaluate, particularly when it comes to gaging their relationship to inflation Continue reading
Something very significant has just happened. It may or may not be on your radar – and if it is, you may be wondering what the appointment of 67-year-old Janet Yellen as the next chair of the US Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, has to do with you. The answer is: Janet Yellen is a … Continue reading
The Federal Reserve should not keep changing the goalposts for raising interest rates, a top Fed official said, just a week before the U.S. central bank convenes a policy-setting meeting where that possibility is likely to be discussed. Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher told an agricultural group in Chicago that the Fed’s current threshold for … Continue reading
Analysis suggests that in the United States today, it might be appropriate for interest rates to remain low until unemployment crosses a “threshold” as low as 5.5 percent Continue reading