The Federal Reserve's interest rate decisions shape the economic landscape, influencing borrowing costs for everything from mortgages and auto loans to business investments. These policy changes directly affect whether businesses expand operations, invest in equipment, or increase staffing. At Employ America, we research how the Fed can better balance its dual mandate, advocating for approaches that prioritize achieving and sustaining full employment while utilizing more targeted tools to address inflationary pressures.
Monetary Policy
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59 Posts
While there are prescriptive upshots to this piece, this piece is meant to get at the core descriptive points about how monetary policy works. There is plenty of room to debate optimal policy and optimal macroeconomic objectives, but we should first be clear about what the Fed's approach
Mar 21, 2023
If you enjoy our content and would like to support our work, we make additional content available for our donors. If you’re interested in gaining access to our Premium Donor distribution, please feel free to reach out to us here for more information. Summary The tension between the Fed’
Fed Policy
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Mar 16, 2023
It has now been almost exactly one year since the Fed started raising interest rates to combat inflation. When they started raising rates, the unemployment rate was at 3.6%. In February, the unemployment rate was… also at 3.6%. Even construction employment, a notoriously interest rate sensitive sector, remains
Mar 15, 2023
We try our best not to "bash" the Fed gratuitously; we believe that strong public institutions are important for solving society's biggest problems. But the events over the past four days should not be sugar-coated: we have a substantial Fed failure on our hands. We have
Mar 10, 2023
At the Senate Banking Committee’s Humphrey Hawkins hearing on Tuesday, Senator Warren questioned Chair Powell about the implications of the Fed’s projections for unemployment, which call for an unemployment rate of 4.6% by year’s end, around an additional two million people without jobs. Powell was resistant
Industrial Production
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Mar 09, 2023
“For the first time, we [central bankers] have had to really study [supply chains] carefully” - Chair Powell As we have argued, a substantial portion of post-pandemic inflation can be traced to supply chain disruption. What was a loosely woven mesh pre-pandemic snapped and disconnected in different places, for different
Feb 15, 2023
Retail sales showed strength in January. As a proxy for gross labor income trends, it confirms both (1) the resilience we're seeing in the labor market and (2) the amplified role of residual seasonality (December understates growth, January overstates/rebounds). Real-time data-watching was already complicated enough due to
We'll have our usual monthly inflation preview soon, but for those curious, here's a bit of a preview to the preview... We all should take heart in how 2022H2 highlighted the possibility and plausibility of a 'soft landing'—disinflation without more unemployment—at odds
How do we evaluate model choice under uncertainty as data points are still coming in? If one model implies prescriptions with direct, catastrophic welfare costs that are empirically difficult to reverse, should the consequences affect how much weight we give the model?
