Economic Letter

Recent surveys have shown that households are expecting higher inflation in the future. These readings, coming at the same time as surging commodity prices, have raised concerns that inflation expectations are no longer well-anchored and that the Fed has lost credibility.

This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on “Monetary Policy and Asset Markets” held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on February 22, 2008. The papers are listed at the end and are available online.

This Economic Letter summarizes the presentations at a symposium held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on May 9, 2008, sponsored by the Bank’s Center for the Study of Innovation and Productivity (CSIP). Presentations are listed at the end, and three of the four are available online.

In the U.S. economy, two-thirds of production and expenditures are devoted to consumer spending, or personal consumption expenditures (PCE), which include most of retail sales, as well as households’ expenditures on such items as rent, utilities, and much of medical care. Because this is such a large sector of the economy, the forecast accuracy of PCE affects the forecast accuracy of some of the key variables that policymakers focus on, such as unemployment, incomes, inflation, and interest rates.

The magnitude of short-term movements in asset prices remains a challenge to explain within a framework of rational, efficient markets. Numerous empirical studies have shown that stock prices appear to exhibit “excess volatility,” that is, prices move too much to be explained by changes in the underlying fundamentals, such as dividends or cash flows.

In the latter half of 2007, the media were full of stories about recalls of consumer goods produced in China, with the majority related to high concentrations of lead used in the paint for toys. The volumes and the values of the affected goods were large; for example, the value of toy industry recalls totaled almost 20% of the overall monthly import of toys and related products from China.

Small businesses are a vital part of the fabric of the U.S. economy—according to the Small Business Administration, small businesses employ roughly half of the nation’s workers. So the question of how much bank financing small businesses are able to obtain is of real importance.

These are challenging times for economic policymakers. The financial turmoil that has been unfolding since last summer raises fundamental questions about the structure of our financial system.