News on inflation and the epidemiology of inflation expectations in China

Inflation expectations are important elements in monetary policy analysis. This paper examines how inflation expectations of Chinese consumers and professional forecasters are affected by media sentiments based on the epidemiological foundations of the sticky information model. Rather than assuming professional forecasts are identical to newspaper forecasts, we assume news media are a common source for the transmission of typical people's inflation expectations. We collect media data from 30 leading newspapers and magazines in China and code news reports into three types of inflation: rising, falling, and unchanged. More importantly, we categorize the media pool into comprehensive, economic, and politically oriented media sources. We find a fundamental connection between news media and inflation expectations. However, there are significantly different impacts of news reports in different media sources on expectations. The difference is mainly concentrated in politically oriented media sources, and may be a reflection of China's unique media administration system.     

Stock market volatility,the news,and monetary policy

The dynamic relationship linking the volatility of equity prices with “the news” and the expected path for monetary policy is investigated. Previous results that link the impact of the news about real activity to changes in current and future interest rates are employed in developing a positive link between changes in volatility and the news. Empirically, our results uncover a positive and statistically significant response of the CBOE volatility index, VIX, to unanticipated changes in employment, but not to inflation. Hence, agents' expectations for the policy response to news have an important influence on the expected volatility of stock prices. (JEL E44, E52)     

Are Weekly Inflation Forecasts Informative?*

Are weekly inflation forecasts informative? Although several central banks review and discuss monetary policy issues on a bi‐weekly basis, there have been no attempts by analysts to construct systematic estimates of core inflation that supports such a decision‐making schedule. The timeliness of news releases are recognized to be an important information source in real‐time estimation. We incorporate real‐time information from macroeconomic releases and revisions into our weekly updates of monthly Swiss core inflation using a common factor procedure. The weekly estimates for Swiss core inflation show that it is worthwhile to update the forecast at least twice a month.     

Some observations on forecasting and policy

This paper offers some thoughts on the use of macroeconomic and financial forecasts in monetary and fiscal policy. It stresses the role of nowcasting in constructing good forecasts: most of the value added in macreoeconomic forecasts comes from getting a good approximation to the jumping-off point. Some specific applications are discussed: long-range debt/GDP projections and forecasting recessions using asset prices. I also discuss the construction and use of density forecasts.     

Is inflation driven by survey-based,VAR-based or myopic expectations? An empirical assessment from US real-time data

The relative importance of survey-based, VAR-based or myopic expectations is evaluated in accounting for US inflation dynamics in a New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) setting. Our contribution is threefold. First, we estimate the NKPC with both final and real-time vintage data in order to control for large revisions in the real GDP data. Second, we distinguish between two different series for VAR-based inflation forecasts—derived by a recursive or rolling-window method—to account for changes in the conduct and transmission mechanisms of US monetary policy after World War II. Third, joint restrictions are tested in the NKPC to assess whether one of the expectational variables is able, on its own, to capture inflation dynamics. On a statistical basis, we find that there is no clear-cut winner between VAR- and survey-based inflation expectations. Most of our estimated NKPC variants conclude that survey inflation expectations tend to have the largest numerical weight. Nevertheless, the difference between VAR- and survey-based expectations’ estimated coefficients is not statistically significant. Moreover, myopic expectations do not play any significant role in the majority of the estimated NKPC variants.     

Asset price targeting in an open economy with cognitive limitations: The best for macroeconomic and financial stability?

The choices of policy targets and the formation of agent expectations have been critical issues addressed by monetary policy management since the financial crisis of 2008. This paper evaluates macroeconomic stability in a new Keynesian open economy in which agents experience both cognitive limitations and asset market volatility. The (im)perfect credibility of various monetary policies (e.g., a Taylor-type rule with- or without asset price targeting, strict domestic inflation targeting, strict CPI inflation targeting, and exchange rate peg) may lead agents to react according to their expectation rules, and thus create various degrees of booms and busts in output and inflation. Simulations confirm that a Taylor-type CPI inflation targeting including an asset price target is the best choice. In contrast, the business cycles induced by Keynesian “animal spirits” are enhanced by strict inflation targeting. Furthermore, a credible exchange rate pegging system with an international reserve pooling arrangement can improve social welfare and stability in an open economy, even though its absolute value of the loss function is slightly lower than a Taylor-type CPI inflation targeting including an asset price target.     

News shocks and asset price volatility in general equilibrium

We study equity price volatility in general equilibrium with news shocks about future productivity and monetary policy. As West (1988) shows, in a partial equilibrium present discounted value model, news about the future cash flow reduces asset price volatility. We show that introducing news shocks in a canonical dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model may not reduce asset price volatility under plausible parameter assumptions. This is because, in general equilibrium, the asset cash flow itself may be affected by the introduction of news shocks. In addition, we show that neglecting to account for policy news shocks (e.g., policy announcements) can potentially bias empirical estimates of the impact of monetary policy shocks on asset prices.     

Monetary policy on twitter and asset prices: Evidence from computational text analysis

In this paper, we dissect the Twitter debate about the future course of monetary policy and trace the effects of selected topics of this discourse on U.S. asset prices. We focus on the “taper tantrum” episode in 2013, a period with large revisions in expectations about future Fed policy. Based on a novel data set of 90,000 Twitter messages (“tweets”) covering the debate of Fed tapering on Twitter, we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a computational text analysis tool, to quantify the content of the discussion. Several estimated topic frequencies are then included in a VAR model to estimate the effects of topic shocks on asset prices. We find that the discussion about Fed policy on social media contains price-relevant information. Shocks to the discussion about the timing of the tapering, about the broader economic policy context and worrying investors are shown to lead to significant asset price changes. We also show that the effects are mostly due to changes in the term premium of yields consistent with the portfolio balance channel of unconventional monetary policy.     

The signalling content of asset prices for inflation: Implications for quantitative easing

We investigate the information content of financial variables as signalling devices of two abnormal inflationary regimes: (1) low inflation or deflation, and (2) high inflation. Specifically, we determine the information content of equity and house prices, private credit volumes, and sovereign and corporate bond yields, for 11 advanced economies over the past three decades, using both signalling extraction and logit modelling. The outcomes show that high asset prices more often signal high inflation than low inflation/deflation. However, in some countries, high asset prices and low bond yields are a significant indicator of low inflation or deflation as well. The transmission time of financial developments to inflation can be quite long (up to 8 quarters). For monetary policy, these findings imply that stimulating asset prices through Quantitative Easing (QE) can effectively influence inflation, but that the effects are quite uncertain, both regarding timing and direction.     

WORLD OUTLOOK

After six years of steadily rising OECD output, fears of a significant rise in world inflation are now increasing. In the last year there has been a slight pick-up in inflation with producer prices up nearly d per cent. But prompt action by the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates before the presidential election appears to have damped inflationary expectations in the US and has given Japan and Germany an opportunity to tighten monetary policy without causing major currency fluctuations. It is also apparent that the other possible source of world inflation, commodity prices, is not a problem. OPEC over-production has ensured that the oil price remains weak and other commodity prices appear to have stopped rising after a brief acceleration at the beginning of the year. Nevertheless the major imbalances in world trade are declining only slowly and without a change in fiscal policy in the major economies it is difficult to believe that minor changes in monetary policy will be sufficient if the process of adjustment begins to falter. Despite these risks, we take a sanguine view of world prospects. Tighter monetary policy should effect a slowdown in world growth next year (already indicated by recent developments, particularly in the US) and this should be sufficient to control inflation which we expect to peak at just under 5 per cent at the beginning of next year. From 1990 onwards we see steady growth accompanied by low inflation.     

Monetary policy,housing rents,and inflation dynamics

In this paper we study the effect of monetary policy shocks on housing rents. Our main finding is that, in contrast to house prices, housing rents increase in response to contractionary monetary policy shocks. We also find that, after a contractionary monetary policy shock, rental vacancies and the homeownership rate decline. This combination of results suggests that monetary policy may affect housing tenure decisions (own versus rent). In addition, we show that, with the exception of the shelter component, all other main components of the consumer price index (CPI) either decline in response to a contractionary monetary policy shock or are not responsive. These findings motivated us to study the statistical properties of alternative measures of inflation that exclude the shelter component. We find that measures of inflation that exclude shelter have most of the statistical properties of the widely used measures of inflation, such as the CPI and the price index for personal consumption expenditures, but have higher standard deviations and react more to monetary policy shocks. Finally, we show that the response of housing rents accounts for a large proportion of the “price puzzle” found in the literature.     

Self-fulfilling deflations

What types of monetary and fiscal policy rules produce self-fulfilling deflationary paths that are monotonic and empirically relevant? This paper presents simple theoretical conditions that guarantee the existence of these paths in a general equilibrium model with sticky prices. These sufficient conditions are weak enough to be satisfied by most monetary and fiscal policy rules. A quantification of the model which combines a real shock à la Hayashi and Prescott (2002) with a simultaneous sunspot that deanchors inflation expectations matches the main empirical features of the Japanese deflationary process during the “lost decade”. The results also highlight the key role of the assumption about the anchoring of inflation expectations for the size of fiscal multipliers and, in general, for any policy analysis.     

The Influence and Policy Signalling Role of FOMC Forecasts

Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) policymakers have published macroeconomic forecasts since 1979 and we examine the effects of FOMC inflation forecasts using a structural VAR model. First, we assess whether they influence private inflation expectations. Second, we investigate the underlying mechanism at work and whether they convey policy signals. We provide original evidence that FOMC inflation forecasts influence private ones. We also find that the influencing effect of FOMC forecasts does not come through current Fed rate changes, that FOMC forecasts affect private expectations in a different way than current policy decisions, and that FOMC forecasts are informative about future Fed rate movements.     

Transmission lags and optimal monetary policy

The credibility problems of monetary policy are enlarged by transmission lags whenever the welfare criterion consists of arguments with differing transmission lags. If, as usually argued, prices react to monetary policy with a longer lag than output, the discretionary bias is substantially increased under a consumer welfare maximizing policy criterion (flexible inflation targeting) in the prototype New Keynesian model. Money growth targeting can significantly reduce the discretionary bias, but is not robust to other specifications of welfare with higher valuation of output stability.     

Swiss National Bank communication and investors’ uncertainty

This paper analyzes the effects of Swiss National Bank communication on stock investors’ uncertainty. Monetary policy news is identified via changes in short- and medium-term futures prices as well as by applying methods from computational linguistics and dictionary approaches to policy statements. Surprises in policy rate changes and regarding the future path of the policy rate exhibit an asymmetric effect on stock investors’ uncertainty. Moreover, by taking into account various topics addressed in the statements, I show that investors’ uncertainty decreases due to an optimistic tone in communications about economic growth. Increased uncertainty expressed in policy statements translate into increasing stock investors’ uncertainty. The results explain how news contained in monetary policy statements reduce noise in financial markets and therefore contribute to financial stability.     

MONETARY TRANSMISSION MECHANISM IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE: SURVEYING THE SURVEYABLE

Abstract.  This paper surveys recent advances in empirical studies of the monetary transmission mechanism, with special attention to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Our results indicate that the strength of the exchange rate pass-through substantially declined over time mainly due to a fall in inflation rates and to some extent due to the so-called composition effect. The asset price channel is weak and is likely to remain weak because of shallow stock and private bond markets and because of low stock and bond holdings of domestic households. House prices may become an exception with booming mortgage lending and with high owner occupancy ratios. While the credit channel could be a powerful channel of monetary transmission – as new funds raised on capital markets are close to zero in CEE – it is actually not, as both commercial banks and non-financial corporations can escape domestic monetary conditions by borrowing from their foreign mother companies. The moderately good news, however, is that those banks and firms are influenced by monetary policy in the euro area because their parent institutions are themselves subjected to the credit channel in the euro area.     

Does money help predict inflation? An empirical assessment for Central Europe

This paper investigates the predictive ability of money for future inflation in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. We construct monetary indicators similar to those the European Central Bank regularly uses for monetary analysis. We find in-sample evidence that money matters for future inflation at the policy horizons that central banks typically focus on, but our pseudo out-of-sample forecasting exercise shows that money does not in general improve the inflation forecasts vis-à-vis some benchmark models such as the autoregressive process. Since at least some models containing money improve the inflation forecasts in certain periods, we argue that money still serves as a useful cross-check for monetary policy analysis.     

Monetary policy and asset prices in an open economy

This paper examines whether central banks should respond to asset price fluctuations in a two-country sticky price model. We compare a monetary policy rule that targets both domestic asset prices and foreign asset prices with several alternative monetary policy rules. This paper shows that this policy rule can produce preferable outcomes because the domestic central bank incorporates important information that both domestic and foreign asset prices possess into its monetary policy. Our model suggests that central banks should consider both domestic and foreign asset prices in a two country framework with asset price fluctuations.     

Why big fiscal deficits and low inflation can coexist

• ▀ The surge in government debt caused by ballooning fiscal deficits is a necessary response to the coronavirus crisis. But we doubt this will lead to a burst of inflation in the advanced economies (AEs), let alone a debt crisis.
• ▀ Our fiscal forecasts assume AEs’ budget deficits averaged 20% of GDP or so in Q2. However, our deficit forecasts point to a sharp narrowing thereafter and for public debt as a share of GDP to peak in 2021.
• ▀ The risks around this forecast skew firmly towards deficits remaining wide, reflecting the balance of risks around our GDP forecasts and the possibility that governments allow some fiscal slippage.
• ▀ A slower narrowing of fiscal deficits than we forecast wouldn't automatically lead to a period of above-target inflation. Indeed, we wouldn't be surprised if larger-than-expected deficits were associated with weak inflation.
• ▀ High levels of corporate debt and weak labour markets raise the risk of private sector retrenchment ahead. In that case, large and sustained fiscal deficits may be needed to fill the vacuum and prevent GDP and inflation from falling. As has been the case in Japan over the past 25 years, large deficits over coming years could be associated with weak GDP growth and below-target inflation.
• ▀ If economies begin to overheat but governments keep fiscal policy loose, inflation could, of course, pick up. But central bank tightening would offset it. We believe the risk of sustained inflation overshoots is limited unless monetary policy were made subservient to governments’ own objectives. And we think the risk of central banks losing independence remains slim.

     

Professional forecasters and real-time forecasting with a DSGE model

This paper analyses the real-time forecasting performance of the New Keynesian DSGE model of Galí, Smets and Wouters (2012), estimated on euro area data. It investigates the extent to which the inclusion of forecasts of inflation, GDP growth and unemployment by professional forecasters improve the forecasting performance. We consider two approaches for conditioning on such information. Under the “noise” approach, the mean professional forecasts are assumed to be noisy indicators of the rational expectations forecasts implied by the DSGE model. Under the “news” approach, it is assumed that the forecasts reveal the presence of expected future structural shocks in line with those estimated in the past. The forecasts of the DSGE model are compared with those from a Bayesian VAR model, an AR(1) model, a sample mean and a random walk.