Tag Archives: United States

US Output Gap: Still negative

John Taylor recently showed how the United States is currently much farther away from returning to “potential output” compared with the recession of the early 1980s, where above-average output growth during the recovery secured a return to the potential output path. Apart from the obvious implications for the evaluation of the current US recovery, this has led to a deeper discussion about the dangers of extrapolating “potential” output from past values (e.g., maybe the 2007 value was just too high?). James Bullard of St. Louis Fed argues (pdf of speech) that the financial crisis lead to a very persistent negative wealth shock that has pushed potential output down. Hence, the … Continue reading

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At the Fed: What did come next?

September 22 the Federal Reserve initiated “Operation Twist” where they announced that they would start restructuring its debt by buying up long bonds with the proceedings from short bond sales, with the aim of lowering the long-term yields. As I mentioned in my post on that occasion, the Fed and Ben Bernanke had then exhausted the three main ways of conducting unconventional monetary policy as defined by Bernanke himself in a paper from 2004: I. Shaping Interest-Rate Expectations; II. Altering the Composition of the Central Bank’s Balance Sheet;  III. Expanding the Size of the Central Bank’s Balance Sheet. In case nothing new would happen to the American economy, the obvious … Continue reading

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