Economic Letter

Bank supervisory agencies are responsible for monitoring the financial conditions of commercial banks and enforcing related legislation and regulatory policy. Although much of the information needed to do so can be gathered from regulatory reports, on-site examinations are needed to verify report accuracy and to gather further supervisory information.

While economists generally accept that monetary policy can influence nominal variables such as the price level and inflation, they continue to debate the relationship between monetary policy and real variables such as the unemployment rate and real GDP. During the early 1960s, many economists and policymakers believed that policy could exploit a stable trade-off between inflation and real economic activity.

In December 1998, the current expansion reached a milestone – it became the longest peacetime expansion in post-World War II U.S. economic history, surpassing the record previously held by the 1982-1990 expansion. In fact, if the expansion continues through January 2000, it will tie the expansion associated with the Vietnam War as the longest expansion since our records of such things start in 1854.

The U.S. financial services industry—especially banking—has undergone substantial technological change and industry restructuring during the 1990s. A variety of new techniques and services have been introduced in all areas of the financial services sector, and industry restructuring through mergers and consolidation has been a defining feature of the banking industry in recent years.

The sluggish economic conditions in Japan during most of the 1990s have taken a toll on the activities of Japanese banks’ California branches and agencies. Foreign branches and agencies are direct units of foreign banks and are not separately capitalized.

This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on Monetary Policy and Monetary Institutions held on March 5-6, 1999, under the joint sponsorship of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

On a typical day in the foreign exchange market roughly $1.5 trillion changes hands. This means that in less than a week foreign exchange transactions have exceeded the annual value of world trade.

The currency crises of the 1990s—the European Union’s in 1992, Mexico’s in 1994, East Asia’s in 1997, and Russia’s and Brazil’s more recently—raise concerns for a number of reasons. They are not only hard on the countries experiencing them, but if they spread widely they also may disrupt the international flow of credit, hindering trade, investment, and GDP growth in the world economy.

In recent years, a number of economists have expressed concern that the stock market is overvalued. Some have compared the situation with the 1920s, warning that the market may be headed for a similar collapse.