September 4, 2025
Enrique Martínez García and Kei-Mu Yi
Typically, trade deficits are viewed through a lens of exports and imports, with the latter exceeding the former. While that is a useful exercise, it’s also helpful to examine deficits through a macroeconomic lens.
September 2, 2025
Enrique Martínez-García and Efthymios Pavlidis
Survey-based forecast data on home price growth are a surer indicator of housing market exuberance than traditional valuation ratios, such as price-to-income or price-to-rent.
August 28, 2025
Jackie Balanovsky, Isabel Dhillon, Pia Orrenius and Guhan Venkatu
The adequacy of the Texas educational system, which enrolls more than 5.5 million children in public kindergarten-through-12 schools, has been a recurring source of concern in the state.
August 26, 2025
Garrett Golding, Claire Jeffress and Xiaohan Zhang
Better understanding of the workforce implications of rising electricity demand, particularly at the state and local levels, is critical to planning and anticipating its economic and policy impacts.
August 21, 2025
Xiaoqing Zhou
In Depth: While hostilities between Iran and Israel ended quickly in June 2025 without a major oil supply disruption, it is worthwhile to explore the impact on inflation and inflation expectations if this geopolitical event had turned out differently.
August 19, 2025
Ali Ozdagli, Dylan Ryfe and Lillian Han
Despite asset managers playing an increasingly pivotal role in investment decisions—leading to more similar portfolios—analysis of life insurance firms and their advisers reveals a relatively small threat to financial stability.
August 14, 2025
Xiaohan Zhang and Grace Ozor
When the Fed lowers its benchmark policy rate, the reduction is usually reflected in a variety of consumer finance rates, notably mortgages. However, there are reasons to believe that such a reduction might not prompt an increase in the volume of mortgage refinances and prepayment activity as has historically occurred.
August 12, 2025
Michael D. Plante, Alexander W. Richter and Sarah Zubairy
The U.S. faces a historically high federal debt-to-GDP ratio, a measure of debt relative to economic output. But how sensitive are interest rates to higher debt?
August 7, 2025
Hugo De Vere, Srini Ramaswamy and Sam Schulhofer-Wohl
In Depth: The Fed has floating-rate liabilities as well as long-lived, zero-interest liabilities. A barbell of floating-rate and long-duration assets would best offset the interest rate risk from these liabilities. Investing in a more diversified mix of durations, while matching the average duration of assets, could be more practical than the barbell approach but would leave a substantial portion of interest rate risk unhedged.
August 5, 2025
Christine Docherty and Alessio Saretto
Reciprocal deposit networks are designed to increase the total amount eligible for FDIC deposit insurance. In recent years, growth of the networks has accelerated, prompting a re-evaluation of the existing deposit insurance framework and raising at least three questions.