Economic Letter

Household leverage in the United States and many industrial countries increased dramatically in the decade prior to 2007. Countries with the largest increases in household leverage tended to experience the fastest rises in house prices over the same period. These same countries tended to experience the biggest declines in household consumption once house prices started falling.

Capital structure theories seek to explain why businesses choose different mixes of debt and equity to finance their operations. Banking firms represent a special case because of certain unique features in the industry, including a federal safety net and extensive regulation. The financial crisis of the past two years provided another set of special circumstances in which banks needed to raise capital. The preference banks have shown for issuing preferred shares in the private market in favor of government financing can be viewed through the lenses of capital structure theories.

The crisis of the past two years has underscored the connections between monetary policy, which seeks to foster maximum employment and price stability, and regulatory policy, which works to protect the financial system. The two domains can’t be regarded as separate. Researchers are currently examining ways in which monetary policy may play a role in managing systemic risk and regulatory policy may serve to promote macroeconomic goals. The following is adapted from a presentation made by the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco to the Institute of Regulation & Risk, North Asia, in Hong Kong on November 17, 2009.

As part of their efforts to promote economic recovery, some central banks have announced they will not raise policy rates for specified time periods. Other central banks have not been as explicit, though they have provided guidance. A comparison of the effects of the Bank of Canada’s conditional promise to hold rates steady through the second quarter of 2010 with the Federal Reserve’s less explicit guidance finds no evidence that market participants make distinctions between these statements.

Predicting the course of inflation is one of the most important challenges facing monetary policymakers. Useful aids to such prediction are the measures of expected future inflation obtained from prices in government bond markets. An examination of recent inflation-indexed and non-indexed U.S. Treasury bond yields suggests that financial market participants believe that the probability of prolonged deflation has become fairly small.

As the U.S. housing market has moved from boom in the middle of the decade to bust over the past two years, the sources of mortgage funding have changed dramatically. The government-sponsored enterprises—Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae—now own or guarantee an overwhelming share of originations. At the same time, non-agency mortgage securitization and loans retained in lender portfolios have largely dried up.

The Federal Reserve and other central banks have responded to the current financial crisis by taking a range of aggressive policy actions aimed at reviving credit markets. In particular, the Fed has pushed the federal funds rate, its key policy instrument, to historically low levels. Research suggests that overall credit conditions since late 2007 have remained tighter than would have been expected based on historical experience and that this tightness may be partly offsetting the Fed’s policy actions.

Disagreement among economic forecasters about the future path of inflation has risen substantially since the start of the recession. The nature of this disagreement varies with the forecast time horizon, with some forecasters expecting much lower short-run inflation and others anticipating much higher long-run inflation. This variation may complicate the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy communications strategy.

The enormity of the current financial collapse raises the question whether the crisis could have been predicted. This is the second of two Economic Letters on the topic. This Letter examines research suggesting that early warning models would not have accurately predicted the relative severity of the current crisis across countries, casting doubt on the ability of such models to forecast similar crises in the future.