May 21, 2026
Alexander Chudik and Enrique Martínez García
We compare Federal Reserve Board staff forecasts with professional forecasts from Blue Chip Economic Indicators for headline Consumer Price Index inflation. The relevant question then is not whether inflation forecasts matter, but rather what their content reveals.
May 19, 2026
Enrique Martínez García and Efthymios Pavlidis
A home is not only a place to live. It is a long-lived asset whose value reflects the housing service it provides over time and the return buyers require, given interest rates and risk. The ongoing combination of high house price-to-rent ratios and strained affordability suggests housing remains a macroeconomic vulnerability, though financial conditions appear more resilient than before the housing bust and subsequent Global Financial Crisis of 2008.
May 12, 2026
Ricardo Reyes-Heroles, Luis Torres and Diego Morales-Burnett
A sequence of major economic and geopolitical events has reshaped the structure of global trade in the past decade. It began with U.S. imposition of tariffs on Chinese goods in 2018. The postpandemic followed with widespread disruption to global value chains—the process of manufacturing a product in stages across several countries.
May 7, 2026
Matthew McCormick and Srini Ramaswamy
Mortgage rates are an important channel for monetary policy pass-through. However, this channel is complex.
May 5, 2026
Ron Mau and Tucker Smith
We compare how price growth evolved in 2025 in core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) categories facing realized tariff rate changes.
April 17, 2026
Lutz Kilian, Michael D. Plante, Alexander W. Richter and Xiaoqing Zhou
Recent research quantifies the impact of 2026 Iran war on U.S. inflation and household inflation expectations under a range of scenarios. Under a plausible scenario, 2026 fourth-quarter-over-fourth quarter headline personal consumption expenditures inflation would increase by 0.6 percentage points.
April 16, 2026
Tyler Atkinson, Jim Dolmas and Rebecca Zarutskie
Divergence of core and trimmed mean inflation readings prompt reassessment of which one is the best indicator of medium-term trend.
April 14, 2026
Cameron Barrett
Retail electricity rates are higher in California than Texas, but electricity cost accounts for a lower share of household budgets in California.
April 9, 2026
Rachel A. Jones, Reid Taylor and Nitzan Tzur-Ilan
Overall, homeowners insurance is becoming less affordable, yet this deterioration in affordability is not well captured by either of the most widely used inflation measures—CPI or PCE—both designed to track price levels rather than affordability or household financial strain.
April 2, 2026
Lorie Logan and Sam Schulhofer-Wohl
Some observers have argued that the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet is too large and complicates the central bank’s operations. We catalog options for reducing the Fed’s major liabilities, which help determine the size of the balance sheet, as well as a framework for assessing the costs and benefits of those options.