Mortgage Rate Intelligence & Market Updates

A 2012 Liberty Street Economics post noted that U.S. monetary policy exhibits a surprising degree of seasonal behavior: over the 1987-2008 period, the Federal Reserve was much more likely to lower interest rates (or abstain from raising rates) in the first month of each quarter than in the two subsequent months. Thirteen years later, we revisit that analysis to investigate whether the seasonal pattern in monetary policy still holds today, in the wake of a rate hiking cycle, a pandemic, a surge in inflation, and a second round of rate hikes. We find that the pattern has indeed continued; however, unlike in the earlier sample period, it can be completely explained by the timing of the FOMC calendar.

In a previous post, we documented how, over the past five decades, the typical U.S. bank has evolved from an entity mainly focused on deposit taking and loan making to a more diversified conglomerate also incorporating a variety of nonbank activities. In this post, we show that an important driver of the evolution of this new organizational form is the desire of banks to efficiently manage liquidity needs.

 
In light of the rapid growth of nonbank financial institutions (NBFIs), many have argued that bank-led financial intermediation is on the decline, based on the traditional notion that banks operate to take in deposits and make loans. However, we argue that deposit-taking and loan-making have not accurately characterized U.S. banking operations in recent decades. Instead, as we propose in this post, absent regulatory restrictions, banks naturally expand their boundaries to include NBFI subsidiaries. A significant component of the growth of NBFIs has in fact taken place inside the boundaries of banking firms.  

In 2025, the Federal Reserve has cut interest rates, trade policy has shifted abruptly, and economic policy uncertainty has increased. How have these developments affected the functioning of the key U.S. Treasury securities market? In this post, we return to some familiar metrics to assess the recent behavior of Treasury market liquidity. We find that liquidity briefly worsened around the April 2025 tariff announcements but that its relation to Treasury volatility has been similar to what it was in the past.

Bank failures and distress can be costly to the economy, causing losses to creditors and reducing the flow of credit and other financial intermediation services. Thus, there is significant value in being able to identify “at risk” banks in a timely and accurate way. In a previous post, we presented a new solvency metric, Economic Capital, and showed how solvency risks in the U.S. banking industry have evolved over time according to this measure. In this post, we continue to draw on our recent Staff Report to present analysis showing that Economic Capital identifies failing banks earlier and more accurately than more conventional solvency measures.

As in previous years, we provide in this post an update on the vulnerability of the U.S. banking system based on four analytical models that capture different aspects of this vulnerability. We use data through 2025:Q2 for our analysis, and also discuss how the vulnerability measures have changed since our last update one year ago.

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 crucial role in bolstering the financial stability of the euro area, namely by reducing the chance of bank runs. However, quantitative evidence on the effects of these interventions on financial stability remains scant. In this post, we quantify the effectiveness of central bank lending programs in supporting financial stability through the lens of a novel structural model discussed in this paper.

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 is also sometimes called involuntary commitment, involuntary psychiatric hold, or sectioning.) Although there is no definitive national accounting, it is estimated that about 1.2 million involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations occur every year (Lee and Cohen 2021). This puts the magnitude on par with the 1.2 million individuals imprisoned in state, federal, and military prisons every year (Carson 2022). In a new Staff Report, we use data from Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, to measure how psychiatric commitments are impacting an individual’s risk of danger to themselves or others, earnings, and housing.

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 challenging. The probabilistic nature of the Survey of Consumer Expectations enables us to make progress on this subject and to construct household-specific time-varying uncertainty. In our recent Staff Report, we empirically show that the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is increasing and concave in perceived uncertainty. This novel empirical evidence poses a challenge for the conventional consumption-savings model with incomplete markets.