Economic Letter
Brief summaries of SF Fed economic research that explain in reader-friendly terms what our work means for the people we serve.
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Postal Savings in Japan and Mortgage Markets in the U.S.
Thomas F. Cargill and Hal S. Scott
Financial system redesign has become high political drama in Japan. In August, 2005, Prime Minister Koizumi’s plan to privatize Japan’s huge postal savings and life insurance system (PSS) was defeated in the Lower House of the Diet.
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Productivity Growth: Causes and Consequences—Conference Summary
Daniel Wilson
The study of productivity growth is among the most important pursuits of economic science. Assessments of it influence macroeconomic policy and in the long run productivity growth drives improvements in the standard of living, the mix of goods and services available, as well as the mix of jobs in an economy.
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2006: A Year of Transition at the Federal Reserve
Janet L. Yellen
This Economic Letter is adapted from remarks by Janet L. Yellen, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, delivered to the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Association of Business Economists in Los Angeles on January 19, 2006.
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Do Oil Futures Prices Help Predict Future Oil Prices?
Tao Wu and Andrew McCallum
The price of oil has risen by about 60% since mid-2004 and by more than 40% since the beginning of 2005. Though the U.S. economy has apparently absorbed this supply shock well so far, the path of future oil prices remains a concern for monetary policymakers.
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The Diffusion of Personal Computers across the U.S.
Mark Doms
For the last fifteen years or so, information technology (IT) has become an ever more important part of the U.S. economy. Looking back over the period, there can be little doubt that the growing use of IT contributed significantly to the economy’s performance, especially in the latter half of the 1990s, when output grew rapidly, unemployment declined to 25-year lows, productivity surged, and the inflation rate actually fell.
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Bank ATMs and ATM Surcharges
Gautam Gowrisankaran and John Krainer
The automated teller machine (ATM) has become a part of everyday life. According to Dove Consulting (2004), there are approximately 371,000 ATMs in the United States that process 30 million transactions per day.
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Shifting Data: A Challenge for Monetary Policymakers
John Fernald and Stephanie Wang
A familiar old saw about the conduct of monetary policy is that it’s like trying to drive a car while looking only in the rearview mirror. The idea is that policymakers are trying to steer a course that will keep the economy close to full employment with low, stable inflation, while their only knowledge of the road ahead is based on data about the past.
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Recent Policy Issues Regarding Credit Risk Transfer
Jose A. Lopez
Over the last decade, a variety of financial tools have been developed for transferring credit risk between financial institutions. Credit risk is defined as the risk that the value of a corporate loan (or debt obligation more generally) will decline due to a change in the borrower’s ability to make payments, whether that change is an actual default or a change in the probability of default.
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Uncertainty and Monetary Policy
Richard Dennis
In any meeting of monetary policymakers, uncertainty is likely to play an important role in their deliberations. According to Alan Greenspan (2003), “Uncertainty is not just an important feature of the monetary policy landscape; it is the defining characteristic of that landscape.”
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The Bretton Woods System: Are We Experiencing a Revival? Symposium Summary
Reuven Glick and Mark Spiegel
This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at the symposium “Revived Bretton Woods System: A New Paradigm for Asian Development?” held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on February 4, 2005, under the joint sponsorship of the Bank’s Center for Pacific Basin Studies and the University of California at Berkeley’s Clausen Center for International Economics.