Mortgage Rate Intelligence & Market Updates

In this post, we examine the evolution of U.S. Treasury market liquidity over the past year, which has witnessed myriad economic and political developments. Liquidity worsened markedly one year ago as volatility increased following the announcement of higher-than-expected tariffs. Liquidity quickly improved when the tariff increases were partially rolled back and then remained fairly stable thereafter (through the end of our sample in February 2026), including after the recent Supreme Court decision striking down the emergency tariffs and the subsequent announcement of new tariffs.

Many modern banking organizations are highly complex. A “bank” is often a larger structure made up of distinct entities, each subject to different regulatory, supervisory, and reporting requirements. For researchers and policymakers, understanding how these institutions are structured and how they have evolved over time is essential. In this post, we illustrate what a modern financial holding company looks like in practice, document how banks’ organizational structures have changed over time, and explain why these details matter for conducting accurate analyses of the financial system.

Since 2018, more than thirty states have legalized mobile sports betting, leading to more than a half trillion dollars in wagers. In our recent Staff Report, we examine how legalized sports betting affects household financial health by comparing betting activity and consumer credit outcomes between states that legalized to those that have not. We find that legalization increases spending at online sportsbooks roughly tenfold, but betting does not stop at state boundaries. Nearby areas where betting is not legal still experience roughly 15 percent the increase of counties where it is legal. At the same time, consumer financial health suffers. Our analysis finds rising delinquencies in participating states, with spillover effects across state lines. What is more, even though the share of people taking up sports betting after legalization is small (roughly 3 percent of the population), overall credit delinquency rises by about 0.3 percentage points. Our findings suggest that sports betting can have dramatic implications for household financial stability.

China has spent considerable government resources to develop advanced electric technology industries, such as those that produce electric vehicles, lithium batteries, and solar panels. These efforts have spilled over to international trade as improvements in price and quality have increased the global demand for these goods. One consequence is that passenger cars and batteries have been disproportionately large contributors to the rise in the country’s trade surplus in recent years. This has not been the case, though, for solar panels, as falling prices due to a supply glut pulled down export revenues despite higher volumes.

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 2025. To summarize, growth in 2026 is expected to be more robust, and inflation more persistent, than predicted in December. Stronger investment is the main driver for higher growth, while cost-push shocks, possibly capturing the effects of tariffs, are the key factors behind higher inflation. Projections for the short-run real natural rate of interest (r*) are the same as in December.

Businesses experienced substantial cost pressures in 2025 as the cost of insurance and utilities rose sharply, while an increase in tariffs contributed to rising goods and materials costs. This post examines how firms in the New York-Northern New Jersey region adjusted their prices in response to these cost pressures and describes their expectations for future price increases and inflation. Survey results show an acceleration in firms’ price increases in 2025, with an especially sharp increase in the manufacturing sector. While both cost and price increases intensified last year, our surveys reveal that these do not contribute to firms believing that inflation will be on the rise in the short or longer term. In fact, firms’ inflation expectations have moderated compared to what was expected a year ago. Firms now anticipate inflation of 3 percent in the year ahead, lower than what was expected last year at this time. Importantly, like last year, longer-term inflation expectations also remain well anchored.

Employer-sponsored health insurance represents a substantial component of total compensation paid by firms to many workers in the United States. Such costs have climbed by close to 20 percent over the past five years. Indeed, the average annual premium for employer-sponsored family health insurance coverage was about $27,000 in 2025—roughly equivalent to the wage of a full-time worker paid $15 per hour. Our February regional business surveys asked firms whether their wage setting decisions were influenced by the rising cost of employee health insurance. As we showed in our companion post, respondents reported an average increase in such costs of more than 13 percent this year. Businesses providing insurance to their workers indicated that absent these cost increases, they would have raised wages by roughly an additional percentage point, on average, suggesting that rising health insurance costs resulted in a drag on wage growth for workers at these firms.

After a period of moderating cost increases, businesses faced mounting cost pressures in 2025. While tariffs played a role in driving up the costs of many inputs—especially among manufacturers—they represent only part of the story. Indeed, firms grappled with substantial cost increases across many categories in the past year. This post is the first in a three-part series analyzing cost and price dynamics among businesses in the New York-Northern New Jersey region based on data collected through our regional business surveys. Firms reported that the sharpest cost increases over the past year were for employee health insurance and utilities, followed by business insurance, and goods and materials inputs. Firms expect cost growth to moderate in 2026. Our second post will examine the sharp increase in employee health insurance costs in more detail and show that such rising costs dampened wage growth for some workers. The third post will analyze firms’ pricing behavior in light of these cost pressures, as well as firms’ inflation expectations.

In this post we provide a measure of “global” r* using data on short- and long-term yields and inflation for several countries with the approach developed in “Global Trends in Interest Rates” (Del Negro, Giannone, Giannoni, and Tambalotti). After declining significantly from the 1990s to before the COVID-19 pandemic, global r* has risen but remains well below its pre-1990s level. These conclusions are based on an econometric model called “trendy VAR” that extracts common trends across a multitude of variables. Specifically, the common trend in real rates across all the countries in the sample is what we call global r*. The post is based on the discussion of an insightful paper by Lukasz Rachel on the drivers of r* presented at the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity Fall 2025 conference.