Economic Letter

Some observers have argued that the nation’s high unemployment rate during the current recovery stems partly from widespread mismatches between the skills of jobseekers and the needs of employers. A recent San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank conference on workforce skills considered evidence that employers have had difficulties finding workers with appropriate skills in recent years. However, these mismatches do not appear to be much more severe than in the past. Overall, the conference proceedings suggested the U.S. economy can still produce good jobs for workers at a variety of skill levels.

Credit is a perennial understudy in models of the economy. But it became the protagonist in the Great Recession, reviving a role it had not played since the Great Depression. In fact, the central part played by credit in the downturn and weak recovery of recent years is not unusual. A study of 14 advanced economies over the past 140 years shows that financial crises have frequently led to severe and prolonged recessions. Shining the spotlight on credit turns out to be crucial in understanding recent economic events and the outlook.

States that were hit hard by the housing bust performed worse economically during the recession of 2007-09. However, the close relationship between the fall in home prices and state economic activity has largely disappeared during the recovery. High unemployment, restrained demand, and idle production capacity are national in scope. These are just the sorts of problems monetary policy can address. The following is adapted from a speech by the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco at the University of San Diego on April 3, 2012.

The overall effect of the global financial crisis on emerging Asia was limited and short-lived. However, the crisis affected some countries in the region more than others. Two main crisis transmission channels, exposure to U.S. financial markets and reliance on manufacturing exports, determined how severely countries in the region were affected. Countries that were relatively less connected to global financial markets and relied less on trade fared better and recovered more quickly than countries that were more dependent on global financial and trade markets.

The adverse labor market effects of the Great Recession have intensified interest in policy efforts to spur job creation. The two most direct job creation policies are subsidies that go to workers and hiring credits that go to employers. Evidence indicates that worker subsidies are generally more effective at creating jobs. However, the unique circumstances of recovery from the Great Recession, especially the weak demand for labor, make hiring credits more effective in the short term.

The second round of Federal Reserve large-scale asset purchases, from November 2010 to June 2011, included regular purchases of Treasury inflation-protected securities, or TIPS. An analysis of liquidity premiums indicates that the functioning of the TIPS market and the related inflation swap market improved both on the days the Fed purchased TIPS and over the course of the LSAP program. Thus, TIPS purchases had liquidity benefits beyond the effect they may have had in reducing Treasury yields.

Even in areas that have a common currency, economic conditions can vary greatly from one region to another. So a single uniform monetary policy may not be appropriate. For example, a simple monetary policy rule at times recommends different interest rates for different regions of the United States. Among euro-area countries, such a rule typically recommends an even greater divergence in interest rates, partly due to lower labor mobility, and less use of fiscal transfers to help smooth shocks.

When the housing boom of the past decade turned into a bust, falling house prices played a primary role in driving up delinquency and foreclosure rates. As housing values fell, distressed borrowers lost equity, which hindered their ability to escape delinquency by prepaying their mortgages by refinancing or selling their homes. Falling house prices may have especially impinged on subprime and adjustable-rate borrowers. These homeowners may have counted on being able eventually to refinance into loans with terms more affordable than those of their original mortgages.

The severe global economic downturn and the large stimulus programs that governments in many countries adopted in response have generated a resurgence in research on the effects of fiscal policy. One key lesson emerging from this research is that there is no single fiscal multiplier that sums up the economic impact of fiscal policy. Rather, the impact varies widely depending on the specific fiscal policies put into effect and the overall economic environment.