ECONOMY
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Why Are Credit Card Rates So High?
Itamar Drechsler, Hyeyoon Jung, Weiyu Peng, Dominik Supera, and Guanyu Zhou Credit cards play a crucial role in U.S. consumer finance, with 74 percent of adults having at least one. They serve as the main method of payment for most individuals, accounting for 70 percent of retail spending. They are also the primary source of unsecured borrowing, with 60 percent of…
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Interoperability of Blockchain Systems and the Future of Payments
Jon Durfee, Michael Junho Lee, Joseph Torregrossa, and Sarah Yu Wang In a previous post, we introduced a three-pillar framework for interoperability of payment systems and discussed how technological, legal, and economic factors contribute to achieve interoperability and aid in the “singleness of money”—that payments and exchange are not subject to volatility in the value of the money itself—in the context of…
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Credit Score Impacts from Past Due Student Loan Payments
Daniel Mangrum and Crystal Wang In our companion post, we highlighted how the pandemic and subsequent policy actions disrupted trends in the growth of student loan balances, the pace of repayment, and the classification of delinquent loans. In this post, we discuss how these changes affected the credit scores of student loan borrowers and how the return of negative reporting…
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The New York Fed DSGE Model Forecast—March 2025
Marco Del Negro, Ibrahima Diagne, Pranay Gundam, Donggyu Lee, and Brian Pacula This post presents an update of the economic forecasts generated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We describe very briefly our forecast and its change since December 2024. As usual, we wish to remind our readers that the DSGE model forecast…
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U.S. Imports from China Have Fallen by Less Than U.S. Data Indicate
Hunter L. Clark With new tariffs on China back in the headlines, this post seeks to offer some perspective on how much China’s exports have really been affected by multiple rounds of U.S. tariffs and export restrictions over the past seven years. The key takeaway is that U.S. imports from China have decreased by much less than has been reported…
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Global Trends in U.S. Inflation Dynamics
Ozge Akinci, Martin Almuzara, Silvia Miranda-Agrippino, Ramya Nallamotu, Argia Sbordone, Greg Simitian, and William Zeng A key feature of the post-pandemic inflation surge was the strong correlation among inflation rates across sectors in the United States. This phenomenon, however, was not confined to the U.S. economy, as similar inflationary pressures have emerged in other advanced economies. As generalized as the…
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Comparing Apples to Apples: “Synthetic Real‑Time” Estimates of R‑Star
Sophia Cho and John C. Williams Estimates of the natural rate of interest, commonly called “r-star,” garner a great deal of attention among economists, central bankers, and financial market participants. The natural interest rate is the real (inflation-adjusted) interest rate expected to prevail when supply and demand in the economy are in balance and inflation is stable. The natural rate…
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When the Household Pie Shrinks, Who Gets Their Slice?
Jacob Conway, Natalia Fischl-Lanzoni, and Matthew Plosser When households face budgetary constraints, they may encounter bills and debts that they cannot pay. Unlike corporate credit, which typically includes cross-default triggers, households can be delinquent on a specific debt without repercussions from their other lenders. Hence, households can choose which creditors are paid. Analyzing these choices helps economists and investors better…
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Firms’ Inflation Expectations Have Picked Up
Jaison R. Abel, Richard Deitz, and Ben Hyman Editors note: Since this post was published, we clarified language in the first paragraph about year-ahead expectations for manufacturing and service firms in the 2025 survey. We also corrected the y-axis range of Chart 2. (March 5, 11 a.m.) After a period of particularly high inflation following the pandemic recession, inflationary pressures…
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Kartik Athreya on His First Year as Research Director of the New York Fed
A year has passed since Kartik Athreya became director of research at the New York Fed. To get some perspective on his experience thus far, we caught up with Kartik and asked about his views on economics, the role of Research at the Bank, and his take on a few of the hot topics of the day. Q: You joined…
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