The coronavirus crisis has left economists scrambling to rejigger their forecasts. In this note, we briefly describe how forecasters have updated their outlook for the US economy, what sort of data they use in their projections, and how economists link the public health outlook to the economic outlook.  Continue reading “Forecasting the Economy During COVID-19”

Financial Stability Review, May 2020 (European Central Bank) COVID-19 is placing unprecedented challenges on EU banks (European Banking Authority) EU watchdog hopeful most banks can absorb €380bn pandemic hit (Martin Arnold, Stephen Morris; Financial Times) What's the ECB doing in response to the COVID-19 crisis? (Sage Belz, Jeffrey Cheng, David Wessel, Daniel Gros, Angela Capolongo; Brookings Institution) Post-crisis Signals in Securitization: Evidence from Auto ABS (Elizabeth Klee, Chaehee Shin; Federal Reserve Board of Governors) Optimal Bailouts and the Doom Loop with a Financial Network (Agostino Capponi, Felix C. Corell, Joseph E. Stiglitz; National Bureau of Economic Research) Coronavirus crisis bailouts: Why they probably won't work politically (Jeffrey Chwieroth, Andrew Walter; VoxEU) Consumers Increasingly Expect Additional Government Support amid COVID-19 Pandemic (Gizem Koşar, Kyle Smith, and Wilbert van der Klaauw; Federal Reserve Bank of New York) Continue reading “News in Systemic Risk: Tuesday, May 26, 2020”

There are times when I do not question the grand scheme of things, so when Pradeep Ghosh, an Ashoka Fellow, invited me to accompany him to Proto Village, I didn’t ask many questions. And that is how I was led to this intentional community in Anantapur, India where people choose to do what they...

Continue reading “Mainstreaming Goodness - Proto Village”

On May 22, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) extended and expanded its “Special Program to Support Financing in Response to the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19)” to 75 trillion yen (about $700 billion). This includes three programs: (1) $186 billion in Outright Purchases of Commercial Paper and Corporate Bonds, (2) $233 billion for the Special Funds-Supplying Operations, and (3) $279 billion for the recently launched New Fund-Provisioning Measure to support small and medium-sized enterprises. The duration of the measures was extended by six months from September 30, 2020 to March 31, 2021. On March 16, the BoJ had announced emergency measures to facilitate corporate financing that included the first two measures (For details on the third measure, see this YPFS blog post).  Continue reading “Bank of Japan Increases Liquidity Measures”