That's Interesting

  • How some older Americans are monetizing their #VanLife

    With large parts of the economy still sputtering under the weight of the coronavirus pandemic, many people are having to scale back. But some older Americans were already living a minimalist lifestyle on the road — and some of them have leveraged their nomadic approach into income.

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  • Economic Activity, Prices, and Monetary Policy in Japan

    Speech at a Meeting with Business Leaders in Okinawa (via webcast)

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  • The Illusion of Wage Growth

    Despite a sharp spike in unemployment since March 2020, aggregate wage growth has accelerated. This acceleration has been almost entirely attributable to job losses among low-wage workers. Wage growth for those who remain employed has been flat. This means that, in the wake of the virus, evaluations of the labor market must rely on a dashboard of indicators, rather than any single measure, to paint a complete picture of the losses and the recovery.

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  • 5 (More) Ways Life Has Changed

    From smoking more cigarettes to stocking up on meatless meats, the pandemic has changed consumer behaviour in some unexpected ways.

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  • How Risky is Australian Household Debt?

    Household debt levels have increased considerably over the past 30 years, both in Australia and elsewhere. In Australia, and other countries with relatively high household indebtedness, this is consistently cited as a key risk to financial and macroeconomic stability.

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  • No Payment, No Problem: Bizarre New World of Consumer Debt

    The New York Fed released a doozie of a household credit report. It summarized what individual lenders have been reporting about their own practices: If you can’t make the payments on your mortgage, auto loan, credit card debt, or student loan, just ask for a deferral or forbearance, and you won’t have to make the payments, and the loan won’t count as delinquent if it wasn’t delinquent before. And even if it was delinquent before, you can “cure” a delinquency by getting the loan deferred and modified. No payment, no problem.

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  • The Bank of Japan’s Responses to the Impact of COVID-19

    Remarks by Governor KURODA at a Webinar Hosted by the Center on Japanese Economy and Business (CJEB) at Columbia Business School (The Bank of Japan’s Responses to the Impact of COVID-19).

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  • Recent COVID-19 Spike and U.S. Employment Slowdown

    The coronavirus pandemic continues to affect employment across the United States. In a previous blog post, we explored the idea of forecasting weekly changes in employment using data from Homebase, a data set that reports changes in employment daily. In this article, we discuss our updated forecasts for employment using this technique and investigate whether the recent changes in the labor market are related to the spike in COVID-19 cases across the country since June.

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  • FRBSF – The Fog of Numbers

    In times of economic turbulence, revisions to GDP data can be sizable, which makes conducting economic policy in real time during a crisis more difficult. A simple model based on Okun’s law can help refine the advance data release of real GDP growth to provide an improved reading of economic activity in real time.

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  • FRBSF – The Rising Cost of Climate Change: Evidence from the Bond Market

    The level of the social discount rate (SDR) is a crucial factor for evaluating the costs of climate change. This paper demonstrates that the equilibrium or steady-state real interest rate is the fundamental anchor for market-based SDRs.

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