The Fed,the Bond Market,and Gradualism in Monetary Policy

We develop a model of monetary policy with two key features: the central bank has private information about its long‐run target rate and is averse to bond market volatility. In this setting, the central bank gradually impounds changes in its target into the policy rate. Such gradualism represents an attempt to not spook the bond market. However, this effort is partially undone in equilibrium, as markets rationally react more to a given move when the central bank moves more gradually. This time‐consistency problem means that society would be better off if the central bank cared less about the bond market.     

Banks' Funding Stress,Lending Supply,and Consumption Expenditure

We employ a unique identification strategy linking survey data on household consumption expenditure to bank-level data to estimate the effects of bank funding stress on consumer credit and consumption expenditures. We show that households whose banks were more exposed to funding shocks report lower levels of nonmortgage liabilities. This, however, only translates into lower levels of consumption for low-income households. Hence, adverse credit supply shocks are associated with significant heterogeneous effects.