The Atlanta Fed's macroblog provides commentary on economic topics including monetary policy, macroeconomic developments, financial issues and Southeast regional trends.
The labor force participation rate ticked up in May, as did the rate of unemployment. As we have noted in the past, the near-term trajectory of the unemployment rate depends critically on what happens to the participation rate. So the question is, can we expect further upward changes in the participation rate? The answer depends a lot on the labor market attachment of those that are currently out of the labor force.
A few weeks ago, my frequent coauthor, Julie Hotchkiss, wrote about what we can gain from detailed labor market data about the activities of people who have exited the labor force. In her posting, she discussed the overall increase in exits from the labor force, with a focus on 25–54 year olds. Her work concluded that while people identified "Household Care" as the dominant activity for those not in the labor force, there has been a significant upward shift since the recession in those indicating "School" or "Other" as their primary reason for not being in the labor force. A supposition is that at least those that indicated they were in school would reenter the labor force at some point, doing so with a higher level of skills or, at least, with skills that are better aligned with labor demand. However, because we know little about those in the Other category, the future labor market attachment for them is less clear.
This post explores data on transitions into the labor force, primarily for those in the Other category. As in the earlier blog, the focus is on individuals aged 25–54, as retirement dominates the activity of older individuals not in the labor force and schooling dominates the activity of younger individuals not in the labor force.
One indicator of whether those in the Other group are planning to reenter the labor force is whether the individuals in this group are classified as marginally attached to the labor force. A nonparticipant who is marginally attached indicates they want employment or are available for employment. Also, they indicate having looked for a job in the previous year but not actively looking for a job at present. Using monthly data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) that are matched year over year, we see that the marginally attached workers do transition back into the labor force at twice the rate of all individuals who are not in the labor force, as chart 1 illustrates. These rates are relatively stable over time.
As chart 2 shows, a much higher proportion of individuals in the Other category are marginally attached to the labor force, compared to other types of nonparticipants. Moreover, the percentage of these marginally attached nonparticipants has increased from around 20 percent to 30 percent over the last three years.
This higher probability of marginally attached workers returning to the labor force combined with the significantly increased share of marginally attached workers in the Other category suggests that we should expect to find a higher share of those in the Other group returning to the labor force than we've seen in the past. But it turns out that this expected development is not what has happened. The Other group also includes individuals who are not marginally attached to the labor market, and their transition rates into the labor market have declined. On net, while the transition rate to employment is highest for the Other category (reflecting the large of share of marginally attached), the transition rate into the labor force does not fully reflect the increased level of marginal attachment to the labor force.
The group with the next highest transition rate to employment is in the School category, which reflects the inherent transitory nature of that activity. However, it is noteworthy that the school transition rate is lower than it was before the recession. This development reflects an increase in the share of individuals continuing to indicate that school is their primary reason for not participating in the labor force from one year to the next. And it suggests that the lower opportunity cost of attending school is influencing the decision to remain in school longer.
While these trends suggest that we could expect to see higher rates of return to the labor force going forward, this potential development will likely require a much better showing of jobs numbers than were seen today before kicking in.
By Melinda Pitts, research economist and associate policy adviser
What is shadow banking? Announcing a new index—hat tip to Ryan McCarthy—Deloitte offers its own definition:
"Shadow banking is a market-funded, credit intermediation system involving maturity and/or liquidity transformation through securitization and secured-funding mechanisms. It exists at least partly outside of the traditional banking system and does not have government guarantees in the form of insurance or access to the central bank."
As the Deloitte study makes clear, this definition is fairly narrow—it doesn't, for example, include hedge funds. Though Deloitte puts the size of the shadow banking sector at $10 trillion in 2010, other well-known measures range from $15 trillion to $24 trillion. (One of those alternative estimates comes from an important study by Zoltan Pozsar, Tobias Adrian, Adam Ashcraft, and Hayley Boesky from the New York Fed.)
What definition of shadow banking you prefer probably depends on the questions you are trying to answer. Since the interest in shadow banking today is clearly motivated by the financial crisis and its regulatory aftermath, a definition that focuses on systemically risky institutions has a lot of appeal. And not all entities that might be reasonably put in the shadow banking bucket fall into the systemically risky category. Former PIMCO Senior Partner Paul McCulley offered this perspective at the Atlanta Fed's recent annual Financial Markets Conference (video link here):
"...clearly, the money market mutual fund, that 2a-7 fund as it's known here in the United States, is the bedrock of the shadow banking system...
"The money market mutual fund industry is a huge industry and poses massive systemic risk to the system because it's subject to runs, because it's not just as good as an FDIC bank deposit. We found out that in spades in 2008...
"In fact, I can come up with an example of shadow banking that really didn't have a deleterious effect in 2008, and that was hedge funds with very long lockups on their liability. So hedge funds are shadow banks that are levered up intermediaries, but by having long lockups on their liabilities, then they weren't part and parcel of a run because they were locked up."
The more narrow Deloitte definition is thus very much in the spirit of the systemic risk definition. But even though this measure does not cover all the shadow banking activities with which policymakers might be concerned, other measures of the trend in the size of the sector look pretty much like the one below, which is from the Deloitte report:
The Deloitte report makes this sensible observation regarding the decline in the size of the shadow banking sector:
"Does this mean that the significance of the shadow banking system is overrated? No. The growth of shadow banking was fueled historically by financial innovation. A new activity not previously created could be categorized as shadow banking and could creep back into the system quickly. That new innovation might be but a distant notion at best in someone's mind today, but could pose a systemic risk concern in the future."
Ed Kane, another participant in our recent conference, went one step further with a familiar theme of his: new shadows are guaranteed to emerge, as part of the "regulatory dialectic"—an endless cycle of regulation and market innovation.
In getting to the essence of what the future of shadow banking will (or should) be, I think it is instructive to consider a set of questions that were posed at the conference
by Washington University professor Phil Dybvig. I'm highlighting three of his five questions here:
"1. Is creation of liquidity by banks surplus liquidity in the economy or does it serve a useful economic purpose?
"2. How about creation of liquidity by the shadow banking sector? Was it surplus? Did it represent liquidity banks could have provided?...
"5. If there was too much liquidity in the economy, why? Some people have argued that it was because of too much stimulus and the government kept interest rates too low (and perhaps the Chinese government had a role as well as the US government). I don't want to take a side on these claims, but it is an important empirical question whether the explosion of the huge shadow banking sector was a distortion that was an unintended side effect of policy or whether it is an essential feature of a healthy economy."
Virtually all regulatory reforms will entail costs (some of them unintended), as well as benefits. Sensible people may come to quite different conclusions about how the scales tip in this regard. A good example is provided by the debate from another session at our conference on reform of money market mutual funds between Eric Rosengren, president of the Boston Fed, and Karen Dunn Kelley of Invesco. And we could see proposals by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the future to enact further reforms to the money market mutual fund industry. But whether any of these efforts are durable solutions to the systemic risk profile of the shadow banking sector must surely depend on the answers to Phil Dybvig's important questions.
By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed
The relative expansion of central banks’ balance sheets
Dave Altig's recent macroblog post on policy actions that affected the Fed's balance sheet made me wonder about how changes to the Fed's balance sheet since the financial crisis compared with other central banks.
Relative to before the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve's asset holdings are currently about 3.3 times larger. Initially, the source of that increase was the collateral associated with various temporary lending facilities that the Fed used to address the financial panic. Those assets were then replaced on net by purchases under the first large-scale asset purchase program in 2009. Then in late 2010, asset holdings increased further as a result of a second large-scale asset purchase program.
Of course, size isn't everything. While it might be tempting to try and interpret the change in the size of the central bank's balance sheet as a summary statistic of the degree of monetary policy accommodation, as Dave Altig's post points out, that interpretation is not so straightforward. Increasing the size of the balance sheet is not the only thing a central bank can do to ease monetary policy when short-term interest rates are very low. For example, in late 2011 the Fed began a maturity extension program that changed the composition of the assets on the balance sheet, but this program did not materially alter the size of the balance sheet.
With this caveat in mind, the following chart compares the proportionate changes in the size of asset holdings of five central banks over the period from the first quarter of 2007 through the first quarter of 2012: the Federal Reserve (FR), the Bank of England (BE), the European Central Bank (ECB), the Bank of Canada (BC), and the Bank of Japan (BJ).
One take-away from the chart is the large variation from country to country. Here are some observations:
Bank of England: Through mid-2011, the proportionate increase in the Bank of England's asset holdings was roughly similar to the Fed's. But then the Bank of England began a second round of large scale asset purchases that sharply increased the size of its balance sheet. By the first quarter of 2012, the Bank of England's asset holdings were about 4.2 times as large as they were before the financial crisis.
European Central Bank: Through mid-2011, the ECB's asset holdings were about 1.7 times their precrisis level. But the sharp increase in the ECB's longer-term lending programs in recent months has resulted in a large increase in the size of ECB's balance sheet. By the first quarter of 2012, the ECB's asset holdings were about 2.5 times what they were before the financial crisis.
Bank of Canada: In 2009, the Bank of Canada's asset holdings had increased to about 1.6 times their precrisis level—similar to the ECB's increase. But as liquidity pressures in Canadian financial markets eased, the Bank of Canada's asset holdings declined in 2010. By the first quarter of 2012, the Bank of Canada's asset holdings were around 1.3 times the precrisis level. (Note that the Bank of Canada's asset data are through February 2012.)
Bank of Japan: The balance sheet of the Bank of Japan did not increase materially during the financial crisis, but has increased somewhat over the last year. By the first quarter of 2012 the Bank of Japan's asset holdings were about 1.2 times the pre-crisis level.
While size isn't everything, it is something. A large expansion in a central bank's balance sheets can create broad policy risks. This study by researchers at the St. Louis Fed suggests that large-scale balance sheet increases are a viable monetary policy tool, provided the public believes the increase will be appropriately reversed (citing the experience of Nordic countries in the early 1990s) or that the reserves created by the expansion will remain within the banking system (citing changes to bank settlement systems in the United Kingdom and New Zealand in the mid-2000s).
New York Fed President Bill Dudley touched on some risks in an interview on CNBC today:
"...We've expanded our balance sheet a lot over the last few years. And additional actions do have costs, and so we have to weight them relative to the benefits...
"One set of cost is the extent we expand our balance sheet or we sell short-dated treasury securities and buy long-dated treasury securities, we have more risk, in terms of our portfolio, interest rate risks...
"The second issue, of course, is if we expand our balance sheet, we could create anxiety among some people that this might actually sow the seeds for future inflation. I don't think expansion of the balance sheet, in any way, compromises the Fed's ability to keep inflation in check over the longer term. But it doesn't matter just what I think. If people in the market think that expansion of the balance sheet could cause future inflation, we have to take those expectations into consideration as a potential cost of monetary policy."
John Robertson, vice president and senior economist in the Atlanta Fed's research department
The latest edition of the San Francisco Fed's Economic Letter (written by Michael Bauer)has a nice review of the different channels through which the Fed's Large Scale Asset Purchase (LSAP) programs—QE, or quantitative easing more popularly—are thought to work:
"Central bank LSAPs potentially may affect interest rates through at least three channels. Notably, all three channels can broadly affect longer-term interest rates, extending beyond those securities that the central bank announces it will purchase:
A portfolio balance channel, because the supply of long-maturity bonds available to private investors is reduced. The reduced supply of longer-term securities targeted by the Fed lowers the amount of interest rate risk in investor portfolios. That in turn decreases the risk premium that they require to hold both the targeted securities and other assets of similar duration. Longer-term interest rates are lowered across the board as a result. Gagnon et al (2011) emphasize this channel for QE1.
A signaling channel, which arises when the Fed's announcements are interpreted as signals of its intent to hold down short-term interest rates further into the future. Bauer and Rudebusch (2011) argue that this channel played an important role for QE1.
A market functioning channel, because QE1 provided relief when conditions in financial markets were dire, liquidity very low, and panic widespread. The Fed's intervention calmed investor fears. Thus, the intervention substantially supported a range of asset prices, including MBS and corporate bonds, lowering their yields."
The article references include links to the Gagnon et al. paper and the Bauer and Rudebusch paper, but none to any studies addressing the "market functioning channel." So I'll provide one: "Did the Federal Reserve's MBS Purchase Program Lower Mortgage Rates?" by Diana Hancock and Wayne Passmore, both senior staff members for the Federal Reserve of Board of Governors. According to Hancock and Passmore, the market functioning channel is key to appreciating the impact of QE1:
"We use empirical pricing models for MBS yields in the secondary mortgage market and for mortgage rates paid by homeowners in the primary mortgage market to measure how distorted mortgage markets were prior to the Federal Reserve's intervention, and the course of market risk premiums during the restoration to normal market functioning...
"We argue that this return to normal pricing occurred because the Federal Reserve's announcement signaled a strong and credible government backing for mortgage markets in particular and for the financial system more generally...
"More specifically, we estimate that the Federal Reserve's MBS purchase program over the course of 16 months reestablished normal market pricing in the MBS market and resulted in lower mortgage rates of roughly 100 to 150 basis points for purchasing houses. Most of the decline in mortgage rates occurred between the announcement of the program, on November 25, 2008, and the implementation of the program in the first quarter of 2009. After this point, both mortgage rates and risk premiums remained relatively stable until the end of the Federal Reserve MBS purchase program."
Hancock and Passmore note that the portfolio balance channel may have played a role after the completion of the QE1 purchases once market functioning had normalized, but the biggest bang was that renormalization itself.
Bauer's observations align with Hancock and Passmore's conclusions:
"QE1 had very pronounced effects on interest rates. The key announcements led to decreases of close to one percentage point. The announcements not only lowered yields on targeted Treasury securities and MBS, but also on corporate bonds...
"The two other programs, QE2 and MEP [maturity extension program], also affected yields of securities that were not targeted for Fed purchases... Generally though, QE2 and MEP affected interest rates much less than QE1 did. One reason is that bond market functioning had largely returned to normal. In addition, expectations of future short-term interest rates were already very low when these programs were announced, leaving little room for further signaling effects. Finally, QE2 and MEP were smaller than QE1."
Earlier this week, in a speech delivered in Tokyo at the Institute of Regulation and Risk, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Dennis Lockhart provided his view on this evidence:
"In my view, these [the QE1] purchase programs played an important role in the transition away from the emergency lending facilities created earlier in the crisis. The emergency credit facilities worked well to stem the downward spiral of the immediate post-Lehman period. Financial markets began the process of repair during the first half of 2009 but were still suffering from relatively serious liquidity pressures. The QE1 operation sustained the liquidity support that had been previously provided by lending through the emergency facilities.
"Because asset purchases largely replaced emergency loans made during the crisis, the net increase in the Fed's balance sheet was relatively modest. In this sense, the quantitative easing label is misleading. The intent and effect of the policy was not to inject a new and sizable quantity of reserves into the economy. Rather, the effect was to sustain liquidity in still struggling and fragile financial markets, particularly those related to residential real estate. For that reason, I prefer the term ‘credit easing' to describe this policy action."
However, the smaller impact of QE2 leads Lockhart to a different conclusion regarding the largest contribution of that program:
"I view QE2 differently. The FOMC [Federal Open Market Committee] formally announced QE2 in November 2010, with its decision to purchase $600 billion in longer-term Treasury securities. However, the policy was signaled in an important speech from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in August of that year. The circumstances at the time were dominated by a falling trend in measured inflation, weakening inflation expectations, and rising probabilities of outright deflation. Each of these developments was effectively reversed as the expectations for QE2 took root, expectations that were ultimately validated by FOMC action.
"Unlike QE1, QE2 did materially expand the size of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet. In my view, this distinction is important. The intent and effect of the two rounds of asset purchases were different. QE1 served to maintain liquidity at a time when financial markets were exceptionally unsettled. In contrast, QE2 was a more traditional monetary action to preserve price stability."
In a sense, this places the effects of QE2 in the signaling channel category, albeit with an emphasis on inflation expectations rather than interest rates directly.
Bauer's article also covers post-QE2 policy—the maturity extension program (MEP, or "Operation Twist") and the insertion of specific calendar dates (currently at least late 2014) to provide forward guidance on the period of time that the FOMC anticipates that the federal funds rate will remain at exceptionally low levels. Lockhart also describes these policies in terms of the "signaling channel," though in these cases with interest rate effects front and center:
"In terms of intent and effect, I think of the explicit forward guidance and the MEP in similar terms. We have entered a phase of the recovery in which sustained monetary accommodation is warranted in order to preserve and advance what is still modest progress on employment and economic growth. Importantly, this modest progress is occurring in the context of what, for me, is acceptable performance with respect to our price stability mandate. Actions that reinforce the maintenance of policy accommodation are appropriate. It is through that lens that I view the MEP and explicit forward guidance on policy rates."
Lockhart's remarks provide his perspective on three somewhat distinct policy challenges—market dysfunction, disinflationary pressures, and a need to sustain monetary policy accommodation—that motivate his support for the three major policy initiatives of the postcrisis period:
"Let me summarize this brief tour of postcrisis monetary policy. I view the sequence of nontraditional monetary policy actions as tailored responses to the particular needs of the economy and financial system at the time they were implemented. My conclusion is that by and large policy actions have been appropriate to the diagnosis of circumstances at the time. And in my assessment they have worked pretty well."
In this light, President Lockhart delivers his policy punch line:
"I have reframed to some extent the original question of what more can be done around the point that policy actions must be matched to circumstances. The challenge policymakers face is judging appropriateness of a tool for circumstances. As popular as it might be in some quarters to rule out further LSAPs (QE3, as it is known), I do not think this option can be taken off the table. QE3 will work under the right circumstances. But I don't believe such circumstances prevail at this time."
By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed
By Melinda Pitts, research economist and associate policy adviser 
