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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The Increase in Inflation Compensation: What’s Up?
Jens H.E. Christensen
Supply and demand imbalances associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have contributed to a sharp increase in price inflation since early 2021. In response, market-based measures of short-term inflation compensation have risen sharply in the United States. Survey-based measures suggest that this has not affected longer-term inflation expectations. However, analyzing the difference between market prices of standard and inflation-indexed government bonds provides tentative indications that investors have raised their 10-year inflation expectations since spring 2021 to levels above their historical range.
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Policy Nimbleness Through Forward Guidance
Mary C. Daly
Bringing inflation down is the Federal Reserve’s number one priority. The goal is to do that without crippling growth and stalling the labor market. This will not be easy, but the economy and the Fed’s policy toolkit have both evolved, which will help for meeting those goals. The following is adapted from remarks by the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco at the Shadow Open Market Committee Conference held at Chapman University in Orange, CA, on June 24.
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Credit Conditions in the Pandemic Mortgage Market
John Mondragon
The recent rapid rise in house prices has raised some questions about the potential risk to broader financial stability. However, credit quality in the mortgage market appears to be very high, and lending standards tightened in early 2020. While low interest rates increased the demand for refinancing, evidence from large nonconforming loans shows that credit supply contracted sharply in March 2020 and remained tight through the early pandemic period. The shift in credit supply suggests that lenders adjusted their standards to mitigate some risk in the housing market.
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How Much Do Supply and Demand Drive Inflation?
Adam Hale Shapiro
Inflation has remained at levels well above the Federal Reserve’s inflation goal of 2% for over a year. Separating the underlying data from the personal consumption expenditures price index into supply- versus demand-driven categories reveals that supply factors explain about half of the run-up in current inflation levels. Demand factors are responsible for about one-third, with the remainder resulting from ambiguous factors. While supply disruptions are widely expected to ease this year, this outcome is highly uncertain.
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Estimating Natural Rates of Unemployment
Brandyn Bok and Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau
Before the pandemic, the U.S. unemployment rate reached a historic low that was close to estimates of its underlying longer-run value and the short-run level associated with an absence of inflationary pressures. After two turbulent years, unemployment has returned to its pre-pandemic low, and the estimated underlying longer-run unemployment rate appears largely unchanged. However, economic disruptions appear to have pushed up the short-run noninflationary rate substantially, as high as 6%. Examining these different measures of the natural rate of unemployment can provide useful insights for policymakers.
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Untangling Persistent versus Transitory Shocks to Inflation
Kevin J. Lansing
How much persistent versus transitory forces contribute to inflation influences the Federal Reserve’s ability to achieve its goal of 2% average inflation over time. If elevated inflation is driven mainly by persistent shocks, then a stronger and longer-lasting policy response is likely to be needed to bring inflation back down. Recent data show that consecutive changes in monthly inflation rates have tended to move increasingly in the same direction. This pattern suggests that the contribution of persistent shocks to inflation has been rising since mid-2019.
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Pandemic Unemployment Effects across Demographic Groups
Evgeniya A. Duzhak
Workers in service industries and occupations with a lot of close social contact suffered the highest job losses during the pandemic recession. This differed from previous downturns, which tended to have their most severe effects on industries with high concentrations of manual labor. As a result, the unemployment impact of the pandemic on different demographic groups has not followed historical patterns, particularly for Asian, Black, and female workers. The unemployment gap between these racial groups has not been as wide as previous economic fluctuations would have predicted.
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Current Recession Risk According to the Yield Curve
Michael D. Bauer and Thomas M. Mertens
The slope of the Treasury yield curve is a popular recession predictor with an excellent track record. The two most common alternative measures of the slope typically move together but have diverged recently, making the resulting recession signals unclear. Economic arguments and empirical evidence, including its more accurate predictions, favor the difference between 10-year and 3-month Treasury securities. Recession probabilities for the next year derived from this spread so far remain modest.
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Steering Toward Sustainable Growth
Mary C. Daly
The inflation outlook combined with a strong labor market leave no doubt that further monetary policy tightening is appropriate. The question is, how much and how quickly? The appropriate path of policy confronts the economic headwinds immediately ahead while also laying the groundwork for the economy we want in the future. The following is adapted from remarks by the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco to the Center for Business and Economic Research, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on April 20.
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Unemployment Insurance Withdrawal
Sarah Albert, Olivia Lofton, Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau, and Robert G. Valletta
Unemployment insurance benefits were expanded substantially to help overcome the pandemic labor market shock in early 2020. However, improved labor market conditions in early 2021 prompted many states to withdraw from the enhanced unemployment benefits programs several months before the federal program was scheduled to end in early September. A comparison of states that ended enhanced benefits early with those that maintained them suggests that the withdrawal is associated with a small pickup in employer hiring, consistent with prior studies that found the unemployment benefit expansions had modest effects.