PrefBlog

TXPR closed at 542.00, down 0.72% on the day. Volume today was 1.19-million, slightly above the median of the past 21 trading days.

CPD closed at 10.82, down 0.28% on the day. Volume was 54,850, below the median of the past 21 trading days.

ZPR closed at 8.88, down 0.45% on the day. Volume was 92,420, third-lowest of the past 21 trading days.

Five-year Canada yields down slightly to 2.90% today.

The Globe claims this is all due to recession fears:

The TSX, S&P 500 and the Nasdaq ended lower on Wednesday after a growing wave of weak economic data deepened worries that the Federal Reserve’s rapid interest rate hikes might tip the U.S. economy into a recession.
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Driving the recession fears, the ADP National Employment report showed U.S. private employers hired far fewer workers than expected in March. That followed Tuesday’s weak job openings data.

As well, the Institute for Supply Management’s survey showed the services sector slowed more than expected last month on cooling demand, while a measure of prices paid by services businesses fell to a near three-year low.

Earlier this week data showed falling factory orders and soft manufacturing activity.
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Reflecting worries about the economy and recent turmoil in the banking sector, interest rate futures imply 61% odds that the Fed will cut interest rates from current levels by the end of its July meeting, according to CME Group’s Fedwatch tool.

Money markets are currently pricing in only a 16% chance the Bank of Canada will cut interest rates at its April 12 meeting, but they are fully pricing in at least a quarter-point cut by September, according to Refinitiv Eikon data late Wednesday.

Gabriel Makhlouf, Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland and Member of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank, gave a speech titled Staying the course: monetary policy to avoid persistentinflation:

To achieve this, the Governing Council decided last month to increase the three key ECB interest rates by 50 basis points. The interest rate applied to our Deposit Facility is now at 3 per cent, up from minus 0.5 per cent last July. This represents a significant tightening of the monetary policy stance, commensurate with the challenges to price stability we have been facing.

The scale and pace of interest rate increases – up 3.5 percentage points in just nine months – is unprecedented. For comparison, previous rate hiking cycles in the euro area in 1999-2000 and 2005-07 saw rates rise by 2.25 and 2 percentage points over a 13 and 21 month period, respectively.
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The euro area economy slowed in the fourth quarter of 2022, with economic growth stagnant in the face of falling private domestic demand. High inflation, prevailing uncertainties and tighter financing conditions dented private consumption and investment, which fell by 0.9 per cent and 3.6 per cent respectively. However, the ECB staff March macroeconomic projections envisage a recovery in the next few quarters as supply conditions improve further, confidence recovers, and firms work off large order backlogs. Rising nominal wages and falling energy prices will partly offset the loss of purchasing power that many households are experiencing as a result of high inflation. This, in turn, will support consumer spending.

Looking ahead, with record low unemployment expected to hold steady at 6.7 per cent, the ECB staff’s current projections embed a significant degree of real wage catch-up, with wages returning to 2022 levels in real terms by end2025. Nominal wage growth projections of 5.0, 4.4 and 3.6 per cent in 2023, 2024 and 2025 are significantly above historic averages.

For wage developments, much will depend on ongoing levels of labour market tightness. While the number of job vacancies in the euro area have started to recede gradually since the turn of this year, the number of job openings relative to unemployed remains at a historic high. Meanwhile, despite the weaker PMI (Purchasing Managers’ Index) data we saw towards the end of 2022, employment expectations remained in significant positive territory (Chart 2, left panel). This suggests that some degree of labour hoarding is taking place, likely reflecting firms’ expectations of a transitory weakness in demand, as well as their ability to absorb higher costs through increased mark-ups (a point I will return to).
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There is potential for profit margins to absorb some of this near-term higher wage growth. As Chart 3 shows, labour costs have not risen by anything close to the same extent as profits in most sectors. For some sectors, the gap between growth in unit profits and unit labour costs during 2022 is very large, for example in agriculture, manufacturing and contact intensive services.
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While price and wage-setting will contain a backward-looking element, especially after a supply-driven surge in inflation, it is important that the forward-looking component remains close to our inflation target in order to avoid an entrenchment of higher inflation in expectations amongst the public. So far, there has been no indication that expectations have become de-anchored from our inflation target. This is true for both survey and market-based measures of longer-term inflation expectations.

Huw Pill, Chief Economist and Executive Director for Monetary Analysis of the Bank of England, gave a speech titled Inflation persistence and monetary policy:

In this speech Huw Pill discusses the outlook for the economy, including how lower energy prices might push down on inflation in the short term, but could also boost demand and therefore impact inflation in the medium term. He stresses that the MPC must continue to monitor how these external shocks to inflation might become embedded in the economy, and therefore risk persistently high domestically driven inflation. He goes into detail about the Monetary Policy Committee’s role in controlling inflation, and the potential impact of its recent significant increases to interest rates. He outlines how the Monetary Policy Committee carefully assesses the impact of interest rate rises that have yet to feed through, with the need to address current inflationary pressures.
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Let me start with some stark and uncomfortable facts. Annual UK CPI inflation was 10.4% in February. That is unacceptably high. The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) is committed to returning inflation to its 2% target on a sustainable basis.
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The MPC has tightened monetary policy over the past eighteen months to achieve the 2% inflation target. Bank Rate has been increased from its effective lower bound of 0.1% to today’s level of 4.25%. Quantitative easing (QE) has been halted and replaced with a programme of quantitative tightening (QT), involving the sale of gilts and corporate bonds held as a result of the Bank’s earlier asset purchase schemes.[1] And the MPC’s communication about the outlook for monetary policy has shifted significantly.
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For data series that exhibit ‘mean reversion’ – in other words series that return to some average level after being shocked away from it – persistence is typically understood in terms of how long it takes to get back to that average level.[7]

Given the MPC’s mandate, CPI inflation will revert to 2% over time. But it is taking longer to return to target than was originally expected, and longer than is desirable. From a policy perspective, we want to understand why this persistence in inflation has emerged. In thinking about that, it is helpful to distinguish between different sources of persistence.[8]

One reason for inflation to have risen above target is that there have been a series of inflationary shocks to the economy, each of which was transitory in itself but – by dint of coming one after the other and operating in the same direction – led to greater persistence in headline inflation overall.

I label this a form of extrinsic inflation persistence.

Such an account resonates with the way the MPC has described the inflation process over the past couple of years.[9] Inflation first rose on account of bottlenecks in international goods markets that emerged from the interaction of disruption to global supply chains and changes in the pattern of consumer demand, both stemming from the lockdowns triggered by the onset of the Covid pandemic. Then, just as these bottlenecks were easing as the pandemic receded, UK energy prices rose dramatically following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting dramatic increase in wholesale European natural gas prices. And now, just as those wholesale gas prices have fallen substantially in recent months, we are seeing another inflationary impulse coming from rises in food prices driven, at least in part, by unexpectedly weak crop yields in southern Europe and north Africa.[10]

Understood in this way, the persistence of UK inflation is largely a manifestation of ‘bad luck’ – a ‘series of unfortunate events’. It reflects a sequence of fundamentally transitory shocks – each of which monetary policy can do little about, for reasons I have already explained – that have cumulated through time into a more long-lasting elevation of headline inflation.

There is much truth in that narrative. But we have to guard against complacency in interpreting recent inflation developments in this way. I recognise that this is potentially both a self-serving and an incomplete view of recent inflation developments in the UK.

For one thing, we need to assess whether the surprises we have been confronted with over recent years could have been anticipated by better analysis and research: for example, could we have forecast the vulnerabilities in global supply chains once the pandemic had struck? Or could we have foreseen the dynamics in food prices given agricultural
ommodity prices? These challenges deserve further research – although it is naïve to believe that there are easy solutions to such formidable analytical problems.

And – in particular, from today’s perspective – we should recognise that persistent deviations of inflation from target, even if stemming from what are fundamentally a series of transitory inflation shocks, might prompt changes in behaviour that generate more long lasting inflationary dynamics.

For example, we might see a shift in long-term inflation expectations or the emergence of ‘second round effects’ in price setting behaviour that threaten to create momentum in inflation even after the original impulse has receded.[11]

This naturally leads to what I label intrinsic persistence in headline inflation. Rather than being driven by a series of external shocks, greater intrinsic inflation persistence emerges when the economy’s response to the same fundamental inflationary shock changes in a way that implies headline inflation takes longer to return to target.
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Of course, the evolution of inflation persistence against the background of the terms of trade
shock stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is only one of many challenges facing monetary policy makers at present. It needs to be seen in the context of other economic disturbances, not least the recent turmoil in the financial sector. We have been told by our colleagues in the Financial Policy Committee that the UK financial system remains robust and resilient. Nonetheless, those of us on the MPC need to remain vigilant to signs of tightening financial conditions and be prepared to respond to the macro implications of any dislocation to credit markets to the extent that they influence the outlook for inflation.

And Rogers got downgraded two notches:

DBRS Limited (DBRS Morningstar) resolved the Under Review with Negative Implications status of Rogers Communications Inc.’s (Rogers or the Company) by downgrading the Issuer Rating and Senior Unsecured Notes rating to BBB (low) from BBB (high). All trends are Stable. The resolution of the Under Review status reflects the completion of the $26 billion acquisition of Shaw Communications Inc. (the Shaw transaction) concurrently with the divestiture of Shaw’s Freedom Mobile to Videotron Ltd. (the Freedom transaction), a wholly owned subsidiary of Quebecor Media Inc. (not rated by DBRS Morningstar). The rating downgrades reflect the increase in gross leverage required to finance the Shaw transaction and anticipated challenges related to network, cultural, and operations integration amid an intensely competitive landscape, while acknowledging the long-term competitive benefits for Rogers as it enhances its national footprint and competitive positioning, particularly in Western Canada. The Stable trends reflect DBRS Morningstar’s expectation of a multiyear deleveraging path toward the Company’s long-term leverage target, as earnings are expected to benefit from a strong market position of the combined entity.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 6.22%, equivalent to 8.09% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.3x. Long corporates yielded 5.06% on 2023-3-31 and since then the closing price has changed from 15.14 to 15.19, an increase of 33bp in price, with a Duration of 12.36 (BMO doesn’t specify whether this is Macaulay or Modified Duration; I will assume Modified) which implies a decrease in yield of about 3bp since 3/31 to 5.03%, so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread (in this context, the “Seniority Spread”) has remained constant at about 305bp since reported March 29.

BIS has released a paper by Claudio Borio, Marco Jacopo Lombardi, James Yetman and Egon Zakrajšek titled The two-regime view of inflation:

Focus

The global surge of inflation that started in 2021 took most observers by surprise. While unforeseen shocks played a key role, the surprise also highlighted limitations of the analytical frameworks typically used to understand and forecast inflation.

Contribution

This study provides a new view of the inflation process. It characterises the process as two regimes – a low- and a high-inflation regime – with self-reinforcing transitions from the low- to the high-inflation one. The value added of this view is to highlight those elements that standard models downplay and to draw new implications for monetary policy.

Findings

First, inflation tends to be self-stabilising in a low-inflation regime but loses that property as it shifts to the high-inflation one. This reflects systematic differences in the co-movement of individual prices and in the behaviour of wage and price setters that determines them. As inflation increases above very low levels, it becomes a more focal point for workers and firms. This increases the likelihood of wage-price spirals.

Second, monetary policy has a smaller impact on inflation in a low-inflation regime, where individual price changes co-move little. It also operates through a quite narrow set of sectoral prices, typically in the services sectors that are more sensitive to economic activity.

As a result, when inflation has settled at a low level, monetary policy can afford to accept moderate, even if persistent, deviations from narrowly defined inflation targets. But it has to respond in a timely and forceful way when transitions to a high-inflation regime threaten.

Abstract

This study provides a view of the inflation process that is complementary to the one captured in standard models, such as those based on the Phillips curve. It characterises the process as two regimes – a low- and a high-inflation regime – with self-reinforcing transitions from the low- to the high-inflation one. The study documents the stylised facts describing the two regimes and the transitions between them based on disaggregated price dynamics and the joint behaviour of wages and prices. Two implications for monetary policy stand out. First, the desirability of conducting monetary policy in a flexible manner in a low-inflation regime, tolerating moderate, even if persistent, deviations from narrowly defined targets. Second, the importance of being pre-emptive when the risk of a transition to the high-inflation regime increases, even though assessing this transition in real time remains challenging.

BIS has also released a Committee on the Global Financial System paper from a Working Group co-chaired by Margarita Delgado (Banco de España) and Toni Gravelle (Bank of Canada) titled Central bank asset purchases in response to the Covid-19 crisis:

Large-scale asset purchases by central banks in response to the Covid-19 pandemic were broadly successful in addressing disruptions in monetary policy transmission and providing additional stimulus. In this report, the CGFS examines the experience of central banks in many small open and emerging market economies that conducted asset purchases for the first time during the Covid-19 crisis as well as in large advanced economies that expanded or reintroduced purchases.

The impact of asset purchases and relative importance of various transmission channels differed across time and economies. The liquidity channel, whereby purchases improved financial market liquidity, was particularly important during the early weeks of the Covid-19 crisis, when markets were stressed.

The signalling channel, whereby purchases foreshadowed the future stance of monetary policy, was less important than the portfolio rebalancing channel, through which purchases altered the duration and credit risk in private investors’ portfolios. The signalling channel contributed more to the easing of financial conditions in countries where policy rates were near the effective lower bound.

In many countries a strong economic rebound and surge in inflation prompted central banks to stop asset purchases within a year or two and to start raising policy rates. The report notes that the relatively short time span of the purchases thereby reduced the risk of unintended side effects.
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As functioning in markets continued to rapidly deteriorate throughout March 2020, for the first time in its history, the BoC unveiled a wide range of large-scale AP programmes across various government and non-government securities markets. Each programme had its own size and scope in order to address dysfunction in a specific market. Similar to other programmes, the government bond purchase programme (GBPP) was introduced with a focus on addressing severe market dysfunctions, but it was the only asset purchase programme to subsequently shift its primary objectives. As market functioning in the government of Canada bond market returned closer to normal levels, the primary objective of the GBPP shifted from supporting market functioning to monetary policy objectives. Specifically, with the BoC’s policy rate at its effective lower bound, the GBPP became a tool for implementing quantitative easing with dual objectives of supporting the economy and achieving the inflation target.

The elevated uncertainty surrounding the impact of the pandemic on economic activity created an enormous demand for liquidity from practically all sectors of the economy that could not readily be accommodated by the financial system. As a result, there was a significant deterioration in market functioning across many markets and a relatively large and rapid rise in risk premia. The AP programmes were rolled out to first address this broad deterioration in market functioning. Reflecting the broad market dysfunction in fixed income markets that are critical to the Canadian financial system and economy, AP programmes spanned government (federal and provincial), mortgage and corporate fixed income markets. Each AP programme had its own individual size and scope of assets purchased. Programmes with multiple eligible issuers were set with outright issuer limits, a target relative to some measure (such as each province’s share of Canada’s GDP), or both. AP programmes in the credit markets specified a relatively high minimum credit rating for eligible assets.

By their end, the BoC’s APs totalled 23.6% of Canada’s 2019 nominal GDP (CAD 1.814 trillion). These purchase programmes were novel for the BoC and the largest in its history – a reflection of the unprecedented nature of the Covid pandemic and crisis. The largest share of purchases consisted of high quality public sector debt and the majority of assets purchased had a relatively short term to maturity. Government of Canada bonds purchased through the GBPP accounted for the largest share of purchased assets (Graph A2).
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When sequencing the exit from quantitative easing, the BoC began to tighten only after net purchases were halted, and balance sheet reduction then took place. The pace of purchases gradually reduced during 2021 until October, when the BoC announced an end to quantitative easing and a move into the reinvestment phase. Well into the reinvestment phase, in March 2022 the BoC lifted its policy rate from the ELB. In April 2022, the BoC announced the beginning of quantitative tightening, whereby maturing government of Canada bonds on the BoC’s balance sheet would no longer be replaced.

The decision to conduct QT passively was influenced by the duration of purchased assets. In the case of Canada, the assets purchased by the BoC had a relatively short average term to maturity and thus the expected relatively fast material decline in asset holdings was not viewed as requiring additional outright sales to achieve the desired balance sheet decline. As information on the holdings of the BoC was publicly available, the passive approach taken towards QT benefited from a predictable transparent tightening for all market participants, limiting unnecessary volatility in markets and complementing increases in the policy interest rate – the primary monetary policy instrument.

The IMF has published a piece by Markus Brunnermeier titled Rethinking Monetary Policy in a Changing World:

Following a lengthy period of low interest rates and low inflation, the global economy is entering a phase characterized by high inflation and high levels of both public and private debt. Fifteen years ago, central banks saw an urgent need to incorporate financial stability and deflation concerns into their traditional modeling of the economy and developed unconventional tools to deal with both.

Although financial stability remains an important concern, there are important differences between the current environment and the one that followed the global financial crisis:

• Public debt is now high, so any interest rate increase to fend off inflation threats makes servicing the debt more expensive—with immediate and large adverse fiscal implications for the government. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis in early 2020, it is also evident that fiscal policy can be a significant driver of inflation.
• Instead of deflationary pressures, most countries are experiencing excessive inflation. That means there is now a clear trade-off between a monetary policy that tries to reduce aggregate demand by raising interest rates and one that aims to ensure financial stability.
• The nature and frequency of shocks have changed. Historically shocks were mostly from increases or decreases in demand—with the prominent exception of the supply shocks during the so-called stagflation of the 1970s. Now there are many shocks: demand vs. supply, specific risks vs. systemic risks, transitory vs. permanent. It is difficult to identify the true nature of these shocks in time to respond. Central bankers need to be more humble.

Bond market volatility has some portfolios changing parameterizations (“Look, Mummy, I got a spreadsheet!”):

But the Treasury market volatility of March 2023 could have lasting consequences as investors may demand higher premiums across the bond yield curve and across the asset spectrum – preferring lighter positions than they would have otherwise.

Investors will now have to factor into their future models a past event that nobody predicted, even though the likelihood of it repeating is equally minimal.

Pim van Vliet, head of quantitative equities at Robeco, notes that investors with shorter-term horizons measured in days, weeks or months will almost certainly see an increase in their risk metrics, such as “Value-at-Risk”, or VaR.

VaR measures the potential maximum loss on a portfolio of investments over a given period of time, and is calculated using historical returns, current market conditions, and measures of past and expected volatility.
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Using data going back to the mid-1980s, markets research and advisory firm Exante Data calculates that the two-year yield’s slide on March 13 was a 6.1 standard deviation move, and the one-week fall on March 15 was a 7.3 standard deviation move.

The statistical probability of a 6 standard deviation, or 6-sigma event, is around one in a billion, and the chance of a 7-sigma event occurring in any given day is 0.000000000129%.

This level of risk would barely be acceptable for investors trading a penny stock, crypto token, or distressed emerging market currency, never mind the asset widely considered to be one of the least volatile in the world.

Canadians expect higher than policy inflation:

Business sentiment in Canada continues to worsen with companies expecting sales growth to slow over the coming year and inflation to remain elevated until at least 2025, according to the Bank of Canada’s quarterly business survey.
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The average respondent to the business survey expects inflation to be 3.9 per cent in two years’ time. That’s nearly twice the Bank of Canada’s 2-per-cent target.

Consumers, meanwhile, think that inflation will still be running at 4.27 per cent in two years. Most respondents blamed supply chain disruptions for high inflation, the Bank of Canada said, although many also pointed to high government spending.
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“Firms indicated that it has become easier to find the workers they need. They attribute this to less competition for labour and an improved labour supply,” the Bank of Canada said, pointing to increased immigration.

“For the first time in several quarters, businesses no longer expect labour costs to put upward pressure on their output price growth,” the bank added.

Even with less competition for workers, businesses still expect to raise wages quickly this year, by an average of 4.7 per cent. That’s down from a peak of 5.8 per cent in the second-quarter 2022 survey, but well above the prepandemic average of around 3 per cent.

The jobs market in the States is cooling, but still hot:

Demand for workers in the United States eased in February, a sign that the red-hot labor market continues to cool off somewhat.

There were 9.9 million job openings, compared with 10.8 million on the last day of January, the Labor Department reported Tuesday in the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, known as JOLTS.

A drop in open positions is a signal that the labor market is slowing down, but the report also showed that it remains healthy: Four million workers quit their jobs during the month, a slight increase relative to January, and the number of layoffs decreased slightly to 1.5 million.

There were 1.7 jobs open for every unemployed worker in February, compared with 1.9 in January, a measure the Federal Reserve has been paying close attention to as it looks to cool hiring, part of its effort to contain inflation.

BIS has released a working paper by Andrej Sokol, Michael Kumhof, Marco Pinchetti and Phurichai Rungcharoenkitkul titled CBDC policies in open economies:

Focus
Central banks are currently considering issuing digital money to the general public, known as central bank digital currency (CBDC). Much attention so far has focused on the microeconomic benefits of CBDC, while the implications for macroeconomic and financial stability remain less well understood. What are the macroeconomic gains and risks associated with CBDC, particularly if it could be transferred across borders? And how should the central bank set its CBDC policy in the light of these potential benefits and costs?

Contribution
We study the macroeconomic and monetary policy implications of CBDC issuance in a rich quantitative framework. We introduce CBDC into a carefully calibrated and estimated two-country DSGE environment, featuring a realistic financial system, monetary policy (via the conventional policy interest rate and a separate CBDC policy) and fiscal policy. We use the model to examine: (i) the consequences of transitioning to a CBDC economy; (ii) the design of optimal simple rules for CBDC policy, in terms of interest rate or quantity; and (iii) the open economy effects of introducing CBDC.

Findings
Transitioning to a CBDC economy brings about substantial welfare gains, worth over 2% of steady state consumption in the long run. By counteracting financial shocks, CBDC policy would also help stabilise aggregate demand and inflation. For example, the optimised CBDC interest rule that responds systematically to the credit gap improves welfare by over 1% of steady-state consumption. Finally, when countries adopt optimal CBDC policies, they reduce volatilities of cross-border banking exposures and exchange rates by about a third.

Abstract
We study the consequences for business cycles and welfare of introducing an interest-bearing retail CBDC, competing with bank deposits as medium of exchange, into an estimated 2-country DSGE environment. According to our estimates, financial shocks account for around half of the variance of aggregate demand and inflation, and for the bulk of the variance of financial variables. CBDC issuance of 30% of GDP increases output and welfare by around 6% and 2%, respectively. An aggressive Taylor rule for the interest rate on reserves achieves welfare gains of 0.57% of steady state consumption, an optimized CBDC interest rate rule that responds to a credit gap achieves additional welfare gains of 0.44%, and further gains of 0.57% if accompanied by automatic fiscal stabilizers. A CBDC quantity rule, a response to an inflation gap, CBDC as generalized retail access to reserves, and especially a cash-like zero-interest CBDC, yield significantly smaller gains. CBDC policies can substantially reduce the volatilities of domestic and cross- border banking flows and of the exchange rate. Optimal policy requires a steady state quantity of CBDC of around 40% of annual GDP.
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We adopt the calibrated and estimated parameters of the pre-CBDC model in a post-CBDC model that is mostly identical, except for the presence of CBDC. We show that the introduction of CBDC equal to 30% of GDP by a single economy is highly beneficial, yielding long run output gains in that economy of just under 6% and long run welfare gains of around 2%. This is because the introduction of CBDC into a large economy like the US can lower real interest rates due to a reduction in the stock of defaultable debt combined with the funding cost advantage of CBDC over defaultable debt, lower distortionary tax rates due to the budgetary space created by lower real interest rates, and lower monetary frictions due to a reduction in tax-like monetary wedges that represent a move of the economy towards the ideal of the Friedman (1969) rule. Bank balance sheets grow significantly in the long run, while banks’ average cost of funding remains approximately constant, countering the notion that introducing a CBDC inevitably leads to bank disintermediation.
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2. In a contractionary episode the CBDC interest rate should, ceteris paribus, increase rather than decrease. The reason is that increasing the CBDC interest rate relative to the rate on reserves lowers the opportunity cost of holding CBDC. This increases the overall quantity of money and thereby stimulates the economy.

3. A countercyclical CBDC interest rate rule can partly share the burden of a countercyclical Taylor rule for the interest rate on reserves in stabilizing inflation and output, while also stabilizing financial variables. The reason is that the CBDC interest rate works through a money supply channel that complements the intertemporal substitution channel of the interest rate on reserves.

The BoC has released a Staff Working Paper by Carola Conces Binder, Rodrigo Sekkel titled Central Bank Forecasting: A Survey:

Central banks’ forecasts are important monetary policy inputs and tools for central bank communication. We survey the literature on forecasting at the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of England and Bank of Canada, focusing especially on recent developments. After describing these central banks’ forecasting frameworks, we discuss the literature on central bank forecast evaluation and new tests of unbiasedness and efficiency. We also discuss evidence of central banks’ informational advantage over private sector forecasters—which appears to have weakened over time—and how central bank forecasts may affect private sector expectations even in the absence of an informational advantage. We discuss how the Great Recession led central banks to evaluate their forecasting frameworks and how the COVID-19 pandemic has further challenged central bank forecasting. Finally, we consider directions for future research.
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A seminal paper by Romer and Romer (2000) shows that Federal Reserve staff forecasts of inflation in the Greenbook are more accurate than private sector forecasts from Blue Chip, Data Resources, Inc., and the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF), and that access to Greenbook forecasts could have helped commercial forecasters improve forecasts. Indeed, “someone with access to both the Federal Reserve and commercial forecasts should not just put positive weight on the Federal Reserve forecast, but put little weight on the commercial one” (Romer and Romer, 2000, p. 438). Correspondingly, the mean squared errors of the Greenbook forecasts are around 25% lower than those of commercial forecasters at most horizons. For real GNP growth, the Fed’s informational advantage is most prominent at short horizons but varies at longer horizons.

To demonstrate the implications of the informational advantage they document, Romer and Romer (2000) show that the Fed’s monetary policy actions reveal some of their private information about the economic outlook. Thus, when the Fed raises the federal funds rate, forecasters revise their inflation expectations upward, which can help explain why interest rates at long horizons respond to monetary policy. Subsequent research has continued to probe the informational advantage of central banks and to examine how central bank expectations influence private sector expectations, even in the absence of a clear informational advantage.

And Central Bankers are examined again in an IMF article by RAGHURAM RAJAN titled More focused, less interventionist central banks would likely deliver better outcomes:

Central bankers of industrialized countries have fallen tremendously in the public’s estimation. Not long ago they were heroes, supporting feeble growth with unconventional monetary policies, promoting the hiring of minorities by allowing the labor market to run a little hot, and even trying to hold back climate change, all the while berating paralyzed legislatures for not doing more. Now they stand accused of botching their most basic task, keeping inflation low and stable. Politicians, sniffing blood and mistrustful of unelected power, want to reexamine central bank mandates.

Did central banks get it all wrong? If so, what should they do?
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Yet stopping the postmortem at this point is probably overly generous to central banks. After all, their past actions reduced their room to maneuver, and not only for the reasons just outlined. Take the emergence of both fiscal dominance (whereby the central bank acts to accommodate the government’s fiscal spending) and financial dominance (whereby the central bank acquiesces to the imperatives of the market). They clearly are not unrelated to central bank actions of the past few years.

Long periods of low interest rates and high liquidity prompt an increase in asset prices and associated leveraging. And both the government and the private sector leveraged up. Of course, the pandemic and Putin’s war pushed up government spending. But so did ultralow long-term interest rates and a bond market anesthetized by central bank actions such as quantitative easing. Indeed, there was a case for targeted government spending financed by issuing long-term debt. Yet sensible economists making the case for spending did not caveat their recommendations enough, and fractured politics ensured that the only spending that could be legislated had something for everyone. Politicians, as always, drew on unsound but convenient theories (think modern monetary theory) that gave them license for unbridled spending.

Central banks compounded the problem by buying government debt financed by overnight reserves, thus shortening the maturity of the financing of the government and central bank’s consolidated balance sheets. This means that as interest rates rise, government finances—especially for slow-growing countries with significant debt—are likely to become more problematic. Fiscal considerations already weigh on the policies of some central banks—for instance, the European Central Bank worries about the effect of its monetary actions on “fragmentation,” the yields of fiscally weaker countries’ debt blowing out relative to those of stronger countries. At the very least, perhaps central banks should have recognized the changing nature of politics that made unbridled spending more likely in response to shocks, even if they did not anticipate the shocks. This may have made them more concerned about suppressing long rates and espousing low-for-long policy rates.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency released the OCC Mortgage Metrics Report for 22Q4:

• • As of December 31, 2022, the reporting banks serviced approximately 12 million first-lien residential mortgage loans with $2.7 trillion in unpaid principal balances (see figures 1 and 2). This $2.7 trillion was 22 percent of all residential mortgage debt outstanding in the United States.2
• • Overall mortgage performance this quarter improved from the fourth quarter of 2021. The percentage of mortgages that were current and performing at the end of the fourth quarter of 2022 was 97.1 percent compared with 96.4 percent at the end of the fourth quarter of 2021 (see figure 6). The CARES Act, signed into law on March 27, 2020, and extended on February 18, 2022, allows for loan forbearance that can extend up to 360 days and is reflected in the mortgage performance data.
• • Servicers initiated 9,166 new foreclosures in the fourth quarter of 2022, a decrease from the prior quarter, but a higher volume than a year earlier (see figure 7). The new foreclosure volume in the fourth quarter of 2022 is lower than pre-COVID-19 pandemic foreclosure volumes. Home forfeiture actions during the fourth quarter of 2022—completed foreclosure sales, short sales, and deed-in-lieu-of-foreclosure actions—increased 42.8 percent from a year earlier to 2,525 (see figure 8). Events associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, including foreclosure moratoriums that began March 18, 2020, and were extended to July 31, 2021, have significantly affected these metrics.

It doesn’t look like we’re in a recession. Not yet, anyway!

The Canadian economy has picked up momentum in the early stages of 2023 and avoided slipping into a recession, despite the highest interest rates in more than 15 years.

Real gross domestic product rose 0.5 per cent in January from the previous month, Statistics Canada reported on Friday. In a preliminary estimate, the agency said the economy grew by a further 0.3 per cent in February.

On an annualized basis, growth is trending toward 2.5 per cent in the first quarter – far stronger than the 0.5 per cent pace that the Bank of Canada had projected. This also marked a rebound from no growth in the fourth quarter, a result that was largely owing to a sharp pullback in inventory investments.

The BoC has released a Staff Working Paper by Serdar Kabaca and Kerem Tuzcuoglu titled Supply Drivers of the US Inflation Since the Pandemic:

This paper examines the contribution of several supply factors to US headline inflation since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify six supply shocks using a structural VAR model: labor supply, labor productivity, global supply chain, oil price, price mark-up and wage mark-up shocks. Our shock identification relies mainly on sign restrictions. But for the global supply chain shock, we propose a new identification scheme combining sign, narrative and variance decomposition restrictions. Historical decomposition results suggest that global supply chain and oil price shocks are the biggest supply contributors to the US inflation during the pandemic. In contrast, labor shortages only mildly contribute to inflation, but their impact on output is larger in that period. Additionally, price and wage mark-up shocks start to significantly contribute to inflation only towards the middle of 2022. Finally, our analysis, which also allows the identification of monetary policy and aggregate demand shocks, suggests that demand and supply factors are almost equally responsible for the movements in the inflation rate during the pandemic.
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On the demand side, some scholars attribute a considerable portion of the rise in inflation to monetary and fiscal policy mistakes. Reis (2022) and Summers (2022) emphasize the cost of a delayed monetary policy response to increases in inflation. Jord`a et al. (2022), Jord`a and Nechio (2022) and Summers (2021) underline the role of fiscal expansions in the sharp increase in inflation. Our results highlight that monetary policy significantly contributes to inflation, especially in 2021 during which authorities use the “transitory” language in their guidance. We also find the aggregate demand increasingly contributes to the rise in inflation following the month when the second fiscal stimulus is announced under the Biden administration in 2021. Overall, in our framework, demand factors including monetary policy shocks are found to contribute to half of the rise in US inflation

The BoC has released a Staff Discussion Paper by Sarah Miller and Patrick Sabourin titled What consistent responses on future inflation by consumers can reveal:

Inflation expectations play a vital role in determining inflation. Central bankers need to understand their intricacies and the information they can reveal. We look at the consistency of consumers’ answers to questions on inflation expectations in the Bank of Canada’s Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations. We analyze factors that may explain consistencies among individuals and overall. We also compare the inflation forecasts of consumers with consistent responses with those of professional forecasters and consumers with varying responses.
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Consumers aged 30 years and over with income above $100,000 and a post-secondary degree are more likely to provide consistent answers. The most important characteristic for consistency is age. For instance, respondents aged 55 years and over are almost twice as likely to provide consistent answers than respondents under 30 years old. We also find that women are less likely to be consistent than men—their point predictions exceed their subjective distributions more often. Indigenous people are less likely than non-Indigenous people to respond consistently. Similar to the gap between consumers’ perceptions of inflation and actual inflation, the likelihood that consumers provide consistent responses may also vary by their shopping patterns.5 For instance, they may be influenced by the prices of goods they purchase frequently, such as food and gasoline. Several factors may influence why certain demographic groups are more likely than others to provide consistent responses. These factors include:

•  a propensity for overpredicting because it is less costly than underpredicting (or vice versa). This is known as asymmetric loss and may cause a consumer to report a point forecast that is outside the interval from their subjective probabilities (for more details, see Patton and Timmermann 2007).
•  a tendency to round probabilities, although Engelberg, Manski and Williams (2009) tested and rejected this hypothesis
•  the possibility that youth, with less experience of high inflation, update their inflation expectations more strongly in response to surprise inflation than older people do (proposed by Malmendier and Nagel 2016)
•  other unobserved personal characteristics such as patience and maturity

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To determine whether the inflation expectations of consumers with consistent responses are more informative of actual CPI inflation than those of other consumers, we look at perceived inflation (i.e., inflation over the past 12 months) separately for these two groups. Chart 7 reveals striking differences. Perceived inflation averaged across consumers with consistent responses is close to actual CPI, but well above actual CPI for consumers with inconsistent responses. Instead, the pattern of perceived inflation averaged across the inconsistent group is closer to CPI inflation for gasoline.
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We know that consumers with consistent views are better than other consumers at forecasting inflation. But how does their forecasting compare with that of professional forecasters? Before the pandemic, the one-year-ahead inflation expectations of consumers with consistent views were systematically above actual inflation four quarters later (Chart 8). Forecasting errors for these consumers were larger than those of professional forecasters in Canada surveyed by Consensus Economics.10 Since the pandemic started, forecasting performance has deteriorated for both groups. However, the one-year-ahead inflation expectations of consistent consumers have been closer to actual inflation than those of professional forecasters. This suggests that, when assessing risks around inflation, we should seriously consider the survey results from these consumers. Their expectations represent an upside risk to the inflation outlook presented in the January 2023 Monetary Policy Report.
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However, like Braitsch and Mitchell (2022), we think targeted and additional forms of communication may be needed to reach consumers with inconsistent responses to encourage them to moderate their inflation expectations. The Bank’s The Economy, Plain and Simple series and the Bank of Canada Museum’s education programs are steps in that direction.

And the BoC has released (boy, they were busy today!) a Staff Discussion Paper by Lin Chen and Stephanie Houle titled Turning Words into Numbers: Measuring News Media Coverage of Shortages:

We generate high-frequency and up-to-date indicators to monitor news media coverage of supply (raw, intermediate and final goods) and labour shortages in Canada. We use natural language processing to construct two news-based indicators and time-varying topic narratives to track Canadian media coverage of these shortages from 2000 to 2022. This makes our indicators an insightful alternative monitoring tool for policy. Notably, our indicators track well with monthly price indexes and measures from the Bank of Canada’s Business Outlook Survey, and they are highly correlated with commonly tracked indicators of supply constraint. Moreover, the news-based indicators reflect the attention of the public on pressing issues.
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We use the Cision news media database to build a corpus (a collection of written texts) of Canadian English economic and management news articles published between January 1, 2000, and July 4, 2022. We extract sentences containing the keyword “shortage” and collect them into daily documents. Then, we use unsupervised natural language processing (NLP) to decompose the news corpus into different shortage topics. These topics reflect media attention on, among others, the supply and labour shortages that affected Canada’s economy from the early 2000s to the 2020–22 period of the COVID-19 pandemic.