The coronavirus pandemic, together with the related disruptions in oil markets and the policy responses by many different governments to the crisis — including restrictions, closures and quarantines, impacting a wide range of businesses in different sectors — have contributed to asset market volatility
...Inflation has gone from being a threat to the economy because it was too high in the 1970s, to being a source of concern today because it is too low. Since 2012, the U.S. Federal Reserve has been persistently unable to lift inflation to reach its 2% target. Why
...The U.S. economy is in its longest expansion on record. As unemployment touches historic lows, a striking feature of this expansion is that contrary to what economic theory would predict, inflation too remains strangely low. Megan Greene (Harvard) and Michael Klein,
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Inflation has averaged just over 1-1/2 percent over the past decade, well below the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent. Such low inflation for such an extended stretch is quite unusual given historical economic relationships. With the current unemployment rate near historic lows, the persistent soft
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There is increasing speculation regarding whether the Federal Reserve might set a negative target for the federal funds rate should the economy enter a recession. If it did, the Fed would not be the first central bank to do so. Although negative policy rates have been rare until recently, the European
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The Federal Reserve kept interest rates low (and took extraordinary expansionary actions) in response to the financial and economic crisis that began in the autumn of 2008. Beginning in December 2015, as the recovery gained traction, the Fed began gradually raising the federal funds rate, the interest
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