ECONOMY
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Consumption Sensitivity of Uncertain Households
Davide Melcangi and Gizem Kosar Uncertainty is a key component of everyday economic decisions of consumers and, perhaps not surprisingly, it plays a central role in economic models. According to economic theory, forward-looking consumers rely on their expectations and perceived uncertainty when making economic decisions. Nevertheless, measuring the uncertainty that households actually perceive, and how it affects consumer behavior, is…
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A Danger to Self and Others: Consequences of Involuntary Hospitalization
Natalia Emanuel, Pim Welle, and Valentin Bolotnyy Every state in the country has a law permitting involuntary hospitalization if a person presents a danger to themselves or others as a result of mental illness. If a person reaches this high bar, the logic goes, they should be confined in a psychiatric hospital for treatment until they are stabilized. (The process…
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The Shadow Value of Central Bank Lending
Tomas Jankauskas, Ugo Albertazzi, Lorenzo Burlon, and Nicola Pavanini After the Great Financial Crisis, the European Central Bank (ECB) extended its monetary policy toolbox to include the use of long-term loans to banks at interest rates close to zero or even negative. These central bank interventions were aimed at supporting the transmission of expansionary monetary policy and likely played a…
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The Rise of Sponsored Service for Clearing Repo
Adam Copeland and R. Jay Kahn Recently instituted rule amendments have initiated a large migration of dealer-to-client Treasury repurchase trades to central clearing. To date, the main avenue used to access central clearing is Sponsored Service, a clearing product that has, until now, received little attention. This post highlights the results from a recent Staff Report which presents a deep…
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End-of-Month Activity Across the Treasury Market
Michael J. Fleming, Jonathan Palash-Mizner, and Or Shachar In a 2024 post, we showed that interdealer trading in benchmark U.S. Treasury notes and bonds concentrates on the last trading day of the month, likely due to passive investment funds’ turn-of-month portfolio rebalancing. In this post, we extend our trading activity analysis to the full range of Treasury securities and market…
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Dutch Treat: The Netherlands’ Exorbitant Privilege in the Eighteenth Century
Stein Berre and Asani Sarkar The term “exorbitant privilege” emerged in the 1960s to describe the advantages derived by the U.S. economy from the dollar’s status as the de facto global reserve currency. In this post, we examine the exorbitant privilege that accrued to the Netherlands in the eighteenth century, when the Dutch guilder enjoyed global reserve currency status. We…
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Do Employers Comply with Pay Transparency Requirements in Job Postings?
Richard Audoly and Roshie Xing Over the past few months, New Jersey and Vermont have joined a growing number of U.S. states in requiring employers to include an estimated salary range in their online job listings. Has this push for greater pay transparency been effective? In this post, we use granular data on U.S. job postings from Lightcast to assess…
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A Historical Perspective on Stablecoins
Stephan Luck Digital currencies have grown rapidly in recent years. In July 2025, Congress passed the “Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act” (GENIUS) Act, establishing the first comprehensive federal framework governing the issuance of stablecoins. In this post, we place stablecoins in a historical perspective by comparing them to national bank notes, a form of privately issued…
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The Emergence of Tokenized Investment Funds and Their Use Cases
Pablo Azar, Francesca Carapella, JP Perez-Sangimino, Nathan Swem, and Alexandros P. Vardoulakis A blockchain is a distributed database where independent computers across the world maintain identical copies of a transaction record, updating it only when the network reaches consensus on new transactions—making the history transparent and extraordinarily difficult to alter. Historically, bonds have traded almost entirely in over-the-counter (OTC) markets, while equities…
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The Financial Stability Implications of Tokenized Investment Funds
Pablo Azar, Francesca Carapella, JP Perez-Sangimino, Nathan Swem, and Alexandros P. Vardoulakis In a previous post, we provided background information about the emergence of tokenized investment funds and their use cases. These use cases are currently limited to the digital asset ecosystem. However, the recent approval of cryptocurrency exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and the passage of the GENIUS Act raise concerns…
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