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September 23, 2022
How Has the Market Responded to Restoring Price Stability?
Note: The author thanks Mark Jensen and Larry Wall for their help with this post.
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) implements monetary policy chiefly through changes in its federal funds rate target, and market participants form expectations about the evolution of future monetary policy decisions based on data they think are relevant to policymakers. Between the June and July FOMC meetings, incoming data started to suggest some parts of the economy might already be feeling the effects of tighter monetary policy. On the other hand, data since July tell a different story, one that suggests the FOMC still has a way to go in its efforts to fight inflation and restore price stability. So how have market participants interpreted these disparate pieces of data, and what could they mean for future monetary policy decisions?
In this post, I use the Atlanta Fed's Market Probability Tracker to understand how data since the June and July FOMC meetings have affected the market's expectations about the path of future monetary policy, similar to the analysis I did with Atlanta Fed economist Mark Jensen in a Macroblog post late last year. As another Atlanta Fed colleague, Mark Fisher, and I discussed in a Notes from the Vault article, the Market Probability Tracker generates estimates of the expected federal funds rate path based on eurodollar futures and options on eurodollar futures. Eurodollar futures and options deliver a three-month LIBOR (the London interbank offered rate) interest rate average, which is closely linked to the federal funds rate. Additionally, eurodollar futures and options are among the most liquid of financial instruments, with contracts that are expiring several years in the future regularly traded. As a result, the Market Probability Tracker generates our best estimates of expected rate paths by incorporating all the available data that the market believes will affect future policy decisions.
Figure 1 below uses the expected rate paths produced by the Market Probability Tracker to illustrate how market expectations between the June and July FOMC meetings responded to new information about the economy. The solid black line in figure 1 below shows the federal funds rate path expected by market participants after the FOMC's meeting press conference on June 15 . The black dotted and dashed lines represent, respectively, expectations after Fed chair Jerome Powell's Senate Banking Committee testimony on June 22
and after the release of the US Department of Labor's weekly report of unemployment insurance initial claims
on June 30. Although economic updates occurred throughout the intermeeting period (the New York Fed maintains a list of important releases going back to 2018 in its Economic Indicators Calendar), the changes in expectations on these two dates best summarize the overall change in the market's expectations. Lastly, the solid orange line represents expectations following the FOMC's press conference
on July 27. I also include (shaded in gray) the target range of 225 to 250 basis points announced at that meeting.
Starting with the black dashed line, after the June FOMC meeting, market participants expected the federal funds rate target range to reach 375 to 400 basis points by the first quarter of 2023 and then fall 75 basis points over the course of the next two years. During his June 22 Senate Banking Committee testimony, Chair Powell said that an economic downturn triggered by rate hikes to tame inflation was "certainly a possibility," although he added that such a downturn was neither the Fed's intent nor, in his view, necessary. His statement was important, albeit qualitative, information for the market because the FOMC in the past has often responded to economic downturns by lowering interest rates, which market participants interpreted as lower overall federal funds rates in the future (represented by the dotted black line). Expectations fell even lower after the Department of Labor's June 30 report hinted at a moderating labor market, with initial claims near five-month highs (represented by the dashed black line). By the July FOMC meeting (represented by the orange line), market participants further expected rate hikes to end this year and then fall 100 basis points during the next two years, as subsequent initial unemployment claims reports remained elevated and the July 21 Philadelphia Fed's manufacturing survey showed a drop in activity.
Figure 2 shows the Market Probability Tracker's estimates of the federal funds rate path expected by market participants following the July FOMC meeting (the solid orange line). It also shows the expected rate path following the August 5 release of the July employment situation report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (represented by the dotted black line), the expected rate path following the September 8 release of the initial unemployment claims report (represented by the dashed black line), and the expected rate path following the September 13 release of the August consumer price index
(represented by the dot-dash line). Much like figure 1, these dates best summarize how market participants reacted to the evolving data since the July FOMC meeting (despite many other data releases occurring throughout the intermeeting period). Lastly, the solid black line represents the expected rate path on September 20, the day before the press conference following the FOMC meeting.
In the eight weeks since the July FOMC meeting, the data that the Committee said it would use to evaluate future policy moves came in much stronger than expected. Rather than moderating, labor markets appeared to tighten, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting a 526,000 increase in nonfarm payrolls in its July jobs report and the Department of Labor reporting a decline in initial unemployment claims throughout August that culminated, in the September 8 report, in their lowest reported levels since May. The consumer price index for August, which many had expected to fall on a month-over-month basis, showed inflation increasing 0.1 percent from July. The less-volatile core measure of inflation that excludes gasoline and food prices also rose 0.6 percent from July, twice the expected rate. Given the data's direction leading up to the September FOMC meeting, market participants expected a more aggressive pace of rate hikes through the end of the year, from 325 basis points after the July FOMC meeting to nearly 450 basis points. They also expect rates to remain much higher for much longer, with rates at the end of 2025 near 350 basis points—which would be at least 100 basis points higher than the 225 to 250 basis points that the chair described as the "neutral" policy rate at his July press conference.
Figure 3 shows the Market Probability Tracker's estimates of the federal funds rate paths that market participants expected the day before the press conference following September's meeting (the solid black line), and after the press conference on September 21 (the solid orange line). Chair Powell, in his opening remarks, commented that tight labor markets "continue to be out of balance" with demand and that "price pressures remain evident across a broad range of goods and services." The information contained in both the press conference and the material released by the Committee did not significantly change market expectations about the future path of monetary policy, which already incorporated recent data on inflation and labor market conditions.
Turning back to the question posed by this post's title, the rate path movements seen in reaction to the incoming data show that, initially, market participants expected rate hikes to end in 2022. But the data, which came in much stronger after the July FOMC meeting, led the market to expect the Fed to raise rates higher than had been expected following the June FOMC meeting. Market participants also expect the Fed to keep those rates much higher for longer in order to cool demand—as Chair Powell put it in his August 26 speech at the Jackson Hole economic policy symposium, "until we are confident the job is done."
More importantly, the movements in the rate paths highlight the insights we can gain from the Market Probability Tracker into how information about the economy affects the market's expectations of future monetary policy decisions. Chair Powell observed during the June press conference that "monetary policy is more effective when market participants understand how policy will evolve." With the rate paths produced by the Market Probability Tracker each day, we can begin to make that assessment.
October 18, 2021
Market Response to Taper Talk
As the Fed discusses reducing its $120 billion in monthly purchases of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities, market pundits have begun to form opinions on whether such talk about tapering will roil markets as it did in 2013. Some believe that, given the size of the Fed's monthly purchases, such discussion will lead to similar market reactions. Others believe that markets today better understand the Fed's decision-making process around its asset purchases and interest rate policy. This market knowledge and experience may help mitigate the negative effect taper talk could have this time. In this post, we provide evidence that both perspectives are at least partially correct.
To be specific, we analyze the past and present discussions on tapering, including the effects that the Federal Open Market Committee's (FOMC) September 2013 meeting, often referred to as the "untaper" meeting because plans for tapering were delayed, and the June 2021 "talking about talking about tapering" meeting had on the market's expectations for the future path of the fed funds rate. We show that a market response similar to 2013 has already occurred in the sense that an increase in the 10-year Treasury rate coincided with market participants expecting an earlier liftoff from a fed funds rate of zero. Subsequent taper talk only marginally affected how the market expects the pace of rate hikes to proceed. In other words, the market responds to increasing Treasury rates by first pricing in a strong opinion about how much time will pass before the first rate hike. Subsequent discussions about tapering have little to no effect on the market expectations for future interest rate policy.
For our analysis, we use the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's, Market Probability Tracker (MPT), to measure the market's expectations for the future course of monetary policy. The MPT is computed and reported every day on the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's website and is described in detail in an Atlanta Fed "Notes from the Vault" post. The MPT uses options contracts on Eurodollar futures to estimate the market's assessment of the target ranges of future effective fed funds rate. Using derivative contracts on Eurodollars has one main advantage over studying the effective fed fund futures directly. Unlike the futures market for fed funds, the options on Eurodollar futures market is one of the most liquid in the world, with a wide collection of traded options. Moreover, Eurodollar futures deliver three-month LIBOR (or London Interbank Offered Rate), which bears a stable relation and high correlation with the effective fed funds rate in global overnight money markets. Together, these features allow the MPT to extract more confidently measures of market expectations of future effective fed funds target ranges.
Turning our attention first to 2013, we look at how the market's expectations for the future path of rates changed as taper talk began to heat up. In figure 1, we plot several of the MPT's daily expected fed funds rate paths from before and after June 2013. Each unlabeled path in the figure is represented by a transparent blue line of the market expectations for the fed funds rate path as of Wednesday of that week. These weekly expected rate paths began on May 1, 2013, and ended on December 18, 2013, when the Fed announced it would begin paring down its asset purchases.
Note: Expectations computed daily with option data on Eurodollar futures contracts from May 1, 2013, to December 18, 2013. Each unlabeled line represents the market's expected path for monetary policy given the data as of Wednesday of the indicated week.
The orange line in figure 1 represents the market expectations as of May 1, 2013. At that time, no substantive discussion about the Fed shrinking its asset purchases had taken place. The FOMC had just released a statement that it would continue to purchase assets "until the outlook for the labor market has improved substantially in a context of price stability." Regarding its interest rate policy, the Committee stated that it "expects that a highly accommodative stance of monetary policy will remain appropriate for a considerable time after the asset purchase program ends and the economic recovery strengthens." Given the Fed's policy, along with the state of the economy, the market expected the first rate hike to be in mid- to late 2015.
Between May 2013 and the next FOMC meeting on June 19, 2013 (the dashed blue line in figure 1), the market's expectation for future monetary policy began to price in an earlier rate hike sometime between late 2014 to early 2015 (see the sequence of transparent blue lines in figure 1 that move up and to the left from the orange to the dashed blue line). During this period between FOMC meetings, Ben Bernanke, then chairman of the Board of Governors, testified to Congress that the FOMC "could in the next few meetings...take a step down in our pace of purchases" (Bernanke Q&A congressional testimony, May 22, 2013).
Bernanke's May 2013 testimony may have contributed to pulling forward market expectations for when the Fed would end its highly accommodative monetary policy since many expected the Fed's asset purchases to end before the fed funds rate was increased from its zero lower bound. The chair's testimony is also credited with setting off what is commonly referred to as the "taper tantrum" in the Treasury market. In figure 2, the blue line shows how much the 10-year Treasury rate had changed since May 1, 2013. According to this figure, Bernanke's testimony was certainly followed by an increase in the 10-year Treasury rate, but this increase continued a trend that began back in May 2013. And market participants had been pricing in an earlier and earlier liftoff date while the 10-year rate was increasing in May, not when the chair testified to Congress.
Note: The blue line represents the change from May 1, 2013, to February 24, 2015. The orange line represents the change from November 5, 2020, to August 27, 2021.
The Committee's June 2013 statement on monetary policy changed little from its May statement, but the expected path for the fed funds rate had already steepened (compare the dashed blue line with the orange line in figure 1). Notably, it was over the six days that followed the June FOMC statement that the 10-year Treasury increased by 40 basis points (see the blue line in figure 2). Many believe this increase in the 10-year rate was due to Bernanke's comments during the post-FOMC press conference when, in responding to a question about asset purchases, he said it would be appropriate to moderate purchases "later this year" and to end purchases "around midyear" 2014. However, for our purposes, we point out the muted impact Bernanke's answer had on the expected rate paths plotted in figure 1.
Over the next couple of months, changes in the fed funds rate path continued to be minimal even in response to Bernanke's attempt to calm other markets by assuring market participants the Fed was committed to a highly accommodative monetary policy. By the September FOMC meeting—a meeting sometimes referred to as the "untapering" meeting because the Committee decided to "await more evidence that progress will be sustained before adjusting the pace of its purchases"—the expected funds rate path was statistically indistinguishable from the June rate path (see the dashed black line in figure 1). However, the September announcement to delay the tapering of its purchases appeared to have caught bond investors by surprise. In figure 2, we see that the 10-year Treasury rate (the blue line) dropped by approximately 20 basis points over the coming weeks—all while the market's expectation for the timing of liftoff remained relatively constant.
Over the rest of 2013, the pace of the expected rate hikes stayed relatively stable. Figure 1 shows this stability by the similar curvature of the expected path lines from September to December. Interestingly, the December FOMC formal announcement that the Fed would begin to reduce its monthly purchases of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities (MBS) by $5 billion each did not change the market's expectations for how long it would be before liftoff (see the solid black line in figure 1). We interpret this as market participants having formed their expectations about the future pace of interest rate hikes when the Treasury rates had increased and as policymakers were beginning to talk about tapering and not when the Fed announced the actual date and pace of its shrinkage in asset purchases.
Now compare figure 1 to the sequence of expected rate paths plotted in figure 3 for the time interval of November 5, 2020, to August 11, 2021. Early in this time period, the orange line in figure 2 shows the 10-year Treasury rate increasing 95 basis points from November 2020 to the end of March 2021 (the high point of the orange line in figure 2). This increase in the 10-year rate was due in part to the improving economic conditions and optimism around the advent of COVID-19 vaccines. This time period also corresponds with a steepening in the market expectations for the fed funds rate path seen in figure 3. The "lower for longer" policy of the Fed can be seen in the flat November FOMC rate path (compare the orange rate paths in figures 1 and 3). But as in figure 1, the expected rate paths in figure 3 gradually steepen while the 10-year rate is increasing.
Note: The fed funds rate path was computed from daily option data on Eurodollar futures contracts from November 5, 2020, to August 27, 2021. Each unlabeled line represents the market's expected path for monetary policy given the data as of Wednesday of the week
The minutes from the April FOMC were released to the public on May 19, 2021 (see the pink rate path in figure 3). These minutes describe several participants suggesting that "it might be appropriate at some point in upcoming meetings to begin discussing a plan for adjusting the pace of asset purchases." Discussion about shrinking the monthly purchases of assets continued into the June 2021 FOMC meeting. Importantly, at the June FOMC press conference, Fed chair Jerome Powell responded to a question about the timeline for reducing asset purchases by saying that people can think of the June meeting as the "talking about talking about" meeting.
The market's expectation about the fed funds rate path to this taper chatter was muted. Market expectations for the first rate hike had already moved up from the middle of 2024 to the first half of 2023. Given the similarity in the paths at the FOMC meetings in June (see the dotted black line in figure 3) and July (the dashed black line in figure 3), and after Chair Powell's Jackson Hole speech (the solid black line), market participants did not alter their expectations about liftoff. Not even the June FOMC's hawkish Summary of Economic Projections affected the views of market participants on the future course of interest rates.
Comparing the sequence of 2013 and 2020–21 rate paths plotted in figures 1 and 3, we might believe that those who think tapering in 2021 will lead to a similar market reaction as in 2013 are right—but only in the sense that both events corresponded to a sizeable increase in the 10-year Treasury rate and not the actual taper.
That being said, after the rate paths in figures 1 and 3 steepened, the limited impact that taper talk had on the rate paths lends support to those who expect tapering to be a nonevent. The relatively constant pace of expected rate hikes found in 2013 and 2021 suggests that a formal announcement by the Fed on reducing its purchases of Treasuries and agency MBS will likely have a limited effect on the market expectations for the pace of future rate hikes. This is especially true for the 18- to 24-month time horizon of the rate paths.
Regardless of whether we believe that there will or will not be a "taper tantrum" similar to the one in 2013, the market expectations calculated from the Eurodollar futures market clearly show two common effects from the events of 2013 and 2020–21. The first is that as the 10-year Treasury rate begins to rise, market participants expect the Fed to start raising the fed funds rate earlier than before. The second effect is that after the first effect, the expected pace of future rate hikes does not appear to be very responsive to taper talk. Hopefully, knowledge of these tapering-related empirical regularities will help market participants form more accurate predictions about future interest rate policies.
November 20, 2013
The Shadow Knows (the Fed Funds Rate)
The fed funds rate has been at the zero lower bound (ZLB) since the end of 2008. To provide a further boost to the economy, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has embarked on unconventional forms of monetary policy (a mix of forward guidance and large-scale asset purchases). This situation has created a bit of an issue for economic forecasters, who use models that attempt to summarize historical patterns and relationships.
The fed funds rate, which usually varies with economic conditions, has now been stuck at near zero for 20 quarters, damping its historical correlation with economic variables like real gross domestic product (GDP), the unemployment rate, and inflation. As a result, forecasts that stem from these models may not be useful or meaningful even after policy has normalized.
A related issue for forecasters of the ZLB period is how to characterize unconventional monetary policy in a meaningful way inside their models. Attempts to summarize current policy have led some forecasters to create a "virtual" fed funds rate, as originally proposed by Chung et al. and incorporated by us in this macroblog post. This approach uses a conversion factor to translate changes in the Fed's balance sheet into fed funds rate equivalents. However, it admits no role for forward guidance, which is one of the primary tools the FOMC is currently using.
So what's a forecaster to do? Thankfully, Jim Hamilton over at Econbrowser has pointed to a potential patch. However, this solution carries with it a nefarious-sounding moniker—the shadow rate—which calls to mind a treacherous journey deep within the hinterlands of financial economics, fraught with pitfalls and danger.
The shadow rate can be negative at the ZLB; it is estimated using Treasury forward rates out to a 10-year horizon. Fortunately we don't need to take a jaunt into the hinterlands, because the paper's authors, Cynthia Wu and Dora Xia, have made their shadow rate publicly available. In fact, they write that all researchers have to do is "...update their favorite [statistical model] using the shadow rate for the ZLB period."
That's just what we did. We took five of our favorite models (Bayesian vector autoregressions, or BVARs) and spliced in the shadow rate starting in 1Q 2009. The shadow rate is currently hovering around minus 2 percent, suggesting a more accommodative environment than what the effective fed funds rate (stuck around 15 basis points) can deliver. Given the extra policy accommodation, we'd expect to see a bit more growth and a lower unemployment rate when using the shadow rate.
Before showing the average forecasts that come out of our models, we want to point out a few things. First, these are merely statistical forecasts and not the forecast that our boss brings with him to FOMC meetings. Second, there are alternative shadow rates out there. In fact, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard mentioned another one about a year ago based on work by Leo Krippner. At the time, that shadow rate was around minus 5 percent, much further below Wu and Xia's shadow rate (which was around minus 1.2 percent at the end of last year). Considering the disagreement between the two rates, we might want to take these forecasts with a grain of salt.
Caveats aside, we get a somewhat stronger path for real GDP growth and a lower unemployment rate path, consistent with what we'd expect additional stimulus to do. However, our core personal consumption expenditures inflation forecast seems to still be suffering from the dreaded price-puzzle. (We Googled it for you.)
Perhaps more important, the fed funds projections that emerge from this model appear to be much more believable. Rather than calling for an immediate liftoff, as the standard approach does, the average forecast of the shadow rate doesn't turn positive until the second half of 2015. This is similar to the most recent Wall Street Journal poll of economic forecasters, and the September New York Fed survey of primary dealers. The median respondent to that survey expects the first fed funds increase to occur in the third quarter of 2015. The shadow rate forecast has the added benefit of not being at odds with the current threshold-based guidance discussed in today's release of the minutes from the FOMC's October meeting.
Moreover, today's FOMC minutes stated, "modifications to the forward guidance for the federal funds rate could be implemented in the future, either to improve clarity or to add to policy accommodation, perhaps in conjunction with a reduction in the pace of asset purchases as part of a rebalancing of the Committee's tools." In this event, the shadow rate might be a useful scorecard for measuring the total effect of these policy actions.
It seems that if you want to summarize the stance of policy right now, just maybe...the shadow knows.
By Pat Higgins, senior economist, and
Brent Meyer, research economist, both of the Atlanta Fed's research department
August 19, 2013
Does Forward Guidance Reach Main Street?
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has been operating with two tools (well described in a recent speech by our boss here in Atlanta). The first is our large-scale asset purchase program, or QE to everyone outside of the Federal Reserve. The second is our forward guidance on the federal funds rate. Here’s what the fed funds guidance was following the July FOMC meeting:
[T]he Committee decided to keep the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and currently anticipates that this exceptionally low range for the federal funds rate will be appropriate at least as long as the unemployment rate remains above 6-1/2 percent, inflation between one and two years ahead is projected to be no more than a half percentage point above the Committee's 2 percent longer-run goal, and longer-term inflation expectations continue to be well anchored.
The quarterly projections of the June FOMC meeting participants give more specific guidance on the fed funds rate assuming “appropriate” monetary policy. All but one FOMC participant expects the funds rate to be lifted off the floor in 2015, with the median projection that the fed funds rate will be 1 percent by the end of 2015.
But forward guidance isn’t worth much if the public has a very different view of how long the fed funds rate will be held near zero. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has a good read on Wall Street’s expectation for the federal funds rate. Its June survey of primary dealers (a set of institutions the Fed trades with when conducting open market operations) saw a 52 percent chance that the fed funds rate will rise from zero in 2015, and the median forecast of the group saw the fed funds rate at 0.75 percent at the end of 2015. In other words, the bond market is broadly in agreement with the fed funds rate projections made by FOMC meeting participants.
But what do we know about Main Street’s perspective on the fed funds rate? Do they even have an opinion on the subject?
Our perspective on Main Street comes from our panel of businesses who participate in the monthly Business Inflation Expectations (BIE) Survey. And we used our special question to the panel this month to see if we could gauge how, indeed whether, businesses have opinions about the future of the federal funds rate. Here’s the specific question we put to the group:
Currently the fed funds rate is near 0%. [In June, the Federal Reserve projected the federal funds rate to be 1% by the end of 2015.] Please assign a percentage likelihood to the following possible ranges for the federal funds rate at the end of 2015 (values should sum to 100%).
In the chart below, we plot the distribution of panelists’ median-probability forecast (the green bars) compared to the distribution of the FOMC’s June projection (we’ve simply smushed the FOMC’s dots into the appropriately categorized blue bars).
Seventy-five percent of our respondents had a median-probability forecast for the fed funds rate somewhere between 0.5 percent and 1.5 percent by the end of 2015. That forecast compares very closely to the 73 percent of the June FOMC meeting participants.
You may have noticed in the above question a bracketed bit of information about the Federal Reserve’s forecast for the federal funds rate: “In June, the Federal Reserve projected the federal funds rate to be 1% by the end of 2015.” Actually, this bit of extra information was supplied only to half of our panel (selected at random). A comparison between these two panel subsets is shown in the chart below.
These two subsets are very similar. (If you squint, you might see that the green bars appear a little more diffuse, but this isn’t a statistically significant difference…we checked.) This result suggests that the extra bit of information we provided was largely extraneous. Our business panel seems to have already had enough information on which to make an informed prediction about the federal funds rate.
Finally, the data shown in the two figures above are for those panelists who opted to answer the question we posed. But, at our instruction, not every firm chose to make a prediction for the federal funds rate. With this month’s special question, we instructed our panelists to “Please feel free to leave this question blank if you have no opinion.” A significant number of our panelists exercised this option.
The typical nonresponse rate from the BIE survey special question is about 2 percent. This month, it was 22 percent—which suggests that an unusually high share of our panel had no opinion on the future of the fed funds rate. What does this mean? Well, it could mean that a significant share of Main Street businesses are confused by the FOMC’s communications and are therefore unable to form an opinion. But a high nonresponse rate could also mean that some segment of Main Street businesses don’t believe that forward guidance on the fed funds rate affects their businesses much.
Unfortunately, the data we have don’t put us in a very good position to distinguish between confusion and apathy. Besides, we’re optimistic sorts. We’re going to emphasize that 78 percent of those businesses we surveyed responded to the question, and that typical response lined up pretty well with the opinions of FOMC meeting participants and the expectations of Wall Street. So, while not everyone is dialed in to our forward guidance, Main Street seems to get it.
By Mike Bryan, vice president and senior economist,
Brent Meyer, economist, and
Nicholas Parker, senior economic research analyst, all in the Atlanta Fed's research department
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