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Skanda Amarnath

Executive Director skanda@employamerica.org

About

As co-founder and Executive Director of Employ America, Skanda both leads our economic policy advocacy and ensures the long-term sustainability of the organization. Skanda’s commitment to our mission of full employment informs all of his work, from regular analyses of price and jobs data, to interpreting and forecasting market conditions, to developing new frameworks for Federal Reserve policy, strategy, and communication.

Skanda draws on a foundation of knowledge and career experience at the intersection of finance and policy. He was Vice President at MKP Capital Management operating as a market economist and strategist, and previously served as an Analyst within the Capital Markets function of the Research Group at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He has undergraduate degrees in Applied Mathematics and Economics from Columbia, and holds a Juris Doctor degree from Columbia Law School.

A frequent media guest and commentator, Skanda has been featured or quoted in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Heatmap News, Politico, Vox, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the American Prospect, the Washington Post, and more. He is also a regular contributor to Bloomberg’s Odd Lots newsletter. Skanda is based in Jersey City, NJ, and enjoys cooking, tennis, and cycling in his spare time.

Skanda Amarnath's Work

759 Posts
Skanda Amarnath

January is always a high-variance month for inflation readings and especially so for this January. We have been flagging the dynamics that were likely to grease the runway to elevated inflation prints in Q4 (which mostly materialized as described). We expect general strength in the January inflation print, primarily due

Conventional wisdom has held that rate hikes slow inflation long enough that straightforward accounts of how exactly one turns into the other are hard to find. Today, everyone needs to be on the same page about how exactly it is that Fed policy in particular can slow inflation.

Friday's employment report is set to be messy for a number of reasons, not just because Omicron is likely to weigh somewhat heavily on nonfarm payroll estimates. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, your best bet to avoid getting spun around by all of the

We provide an update on what our in-house monetary policy framework suggests about the appropriate trajectory for monetary policy using more reliable “real-time” measures of gross labor income

The prime-age employment rate rose by 0.5% in November 2021 to 78.8%, but this was abnormally low relative to the not seasonally adjusted (NSA) estimate of 79.3%. The 2019Q4 peak was 80.3%. The next employment report will feature seasonal factor revisions in the household survey (the

Critical to the Fed successfully achieving maximum employment over the short run and the longer run is a commitment to, and a communication of, “maximum employment” that is Credible, Broad, and Inclusive.

If the Fed wants to stay true to the "maximum employment" component of its forward guidance, and the "broad and inclusive" nature of that goal, it is imperative that their interest rate policy actions reflect a full recovery on both of these measures.

Labor Force Participation Is Already Recovering: Look At The Prime-Age Cohorts

Chair Powell and others have bemoaned the allegedly sideways trajectory of labor force participation, while other commentators have taken an even more pessimistic view, assuming that a large swath of people who were employed just two years ago to be permanently unavailable now. To evaluate the recovery correctly (and measure

The policy mistake worth worrying about isn’t the speed of taper per se; it's the signal that taper sends about the timing of liftoff in interest rate policy.

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