MacroScope

Moving from one house or apartment to another is mainly onerous, but one of its few pleasures is coming across papers you have not seen for years: the adventure stories your grown son wrote when he was eight years old or the book report he wrote on William Shakespeare’s Richard III when he was 10.

Another potential source of amusement is finding an older newspaper or magazine article or column, preserved on purpose or inadvertently. One reads these pieces with the benefit of time: You, dear reader, have seen the future at which the columnist, either hapless or prescient, could only make a guess, educated or otherwise.

So herewith are excerpts from two side-by-side columns published in the Summer 2005 edition of TIAA-CREF’s “advance,” two years before the financial crisis sent the global economy into its worst downturn since the Great Depression.

On the left side of page 19, Robert Shiller, professor of economics at Yale University, began a column entitled “Homes are a Risky Long-Term Investment.”

On the right side, Richard Peach – then a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and now a senior vice president in the area of macroeconomic and monetary studies – wrote under the headline: “Is There a Housing Bubble?”

While Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was noting the recent strengthening of the U.S. job market is “out of sync” with an otherwise slow recovery on Monday, economists at the New York Fed drew attention to the jobless rate itself by saying that some big changes lie ahead for U.S. labor.

The jobless rate may fall faster than expected to less than 5 percent in five years’ time, the economists said in the first in a series of posts but that seems likely to be due more to the fact that fewer people will be in the labor market than to future job creation.

The post notes how, between 2008 and 2012, the employment to-population ratio had a different pattern than in previous economic cycles, with the unemployment rate falling “because the participation rates declined substantially”. Given the U.S. aging population, with 10,000 baby boomers turning 65 each day, this rate is likely to decline even more. The argument has interesting implications, including a potential decline in the usefulness of the jobless rate as a gauge of well-being.

How high or low are the public’s expectations for future inflation? It depends on how you ask the question, according to New York Fed research.
The closely-watched Michigan Survey of Consumers asks questions about “prices in general” to measure expected and perceived inflation.
But New York Fed researchers found survey questions that use the word ‘prices’ instead of ‘inflation rate’  “may bias expectations upwards.”
Responses to questions about “prices in general,” were significantly higher than responses for “the rate of inflation” when asking for expectations of the next 12 months, they found.
Why?  Questions that used the word ‘prices’  “focused respondents relatively more on personal price experiences and elicited expectations that were more strongly correlate to the expected price increases for food and transportation,” the researchers wrote.
The Federal Reserve keeps a close eye on inflation expectations, as they can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Read the full report here

To say former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is no fan of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York would be an understatement.

After arguing financial regulatory reform proposals being discussed in Washington fall short, he said:

“One institution needs to be completely overhauled: The New York Fed,” he said.