Simply Put

Unlike the markets for Treasury securities and MBS, the market for loans can be opaque and illiquid, making it difficult for financial institutions to optimize their loan portfolios and find appropriate counterparties with which to buy and sell loans. Periods of macroeconomic and interest rate volatility can also complicate the ability to accurately price loans for assets like commercial real esta...

Tourism has bounced back after significantly suffering during early pandemic shutdowns. Households across the income spectrum continue to spend on discretionary travel despite economic pessimism and depleted savings. Tourism’s recovery and strength offer insight into how the overall economy has managed to weather high inflation and aggressive Fed tightening without tipping into a recession. In thi...

The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model is followed closely by financial market participants as an estimate for economic growth. Rather than looking at a long-term horizon, the model focuses only on the current quarter and updates its estimate after important monthly data reports, giving a real-time ability to check the pulse of the economy instead of waiting for each quarterly GDP release. In this episode...

In his 1986 PhD thesis, Campbell Harvey identified the predictive power of the inverted yield curve through four business cycles. With curve inversion correctly foretelling three more recessions since then, investors this cycle have been anticipating an impending downturn ever since the yield curve inverted nearly two years ago. In this episode, we talk with Dr. Campbell Harvey, Professor of Finan...

Although the Fed appears to be on the cusp of finally lowering interest rates, the rapid monetary tightening of the last two years has caused significant distress within commercial real estate (CRE). The bleakest doomsday predictions have not come to pass, but property owners have still experienced real losses as people shift to new post-pandemic ways of working and living. In this episode, we tal...

Almost every state and local government worker in the US participates in a public pension system, creating a strong bond between the fiscal health of states and municipalities and their employees’ retirement systems. These smaller systems have faced the same demographic challenges driving concerns over Social Security’s funding, but they’ve also had to deal with rapid migration flows, fluctuating...

China’s booming real estate sector helped propel the country’s tremendous growth over the last few decades. This rapid increase in property valuations contributed to a speculative frenzy that led to overindebted firms, unfinished houses, and a collapse in consumer confidence for homeownership. In this episode, we talk with Kristy Hung, Senior Analyst for China Real Estate with Bloomberg Intelligen...

Oil prices have remained relatively steady during the last couple of years despite robust global demand and ongoing geopolitical risks from multiple foreign wars. The ability of domestic producers to increase production has played a large part in keeping prices in check, a notable contrast to only 20 years ago when the US was significantly more dependent on buying energy commodities from abroad. I...

As the Fed continues to fight high inflation, some analysts have argued that structural forces are making the ideal inflation target higher than 2% in the post-pandemic economy. Factors out of the Fed’s control are making it particularly difficult this cycle to fully restore price stability without tipping the economy into a recession. Although the current regime has a relatively short history, fi...

Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) nearly 50 years ago to encourage lending within financial institutions’ local communities. Since its passage, regulators have tried to modernize the CRA in order to keep up with broad changes in the financial system. Today, banks and bank examiners are preparing for possible reforms in the coming years that would significantly alter how they com...

Loans issued by the Small Business Administration are pooled into securities that are backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, have a quarterly adjusting feature, and have no floating rate cap. The SBA market is big and liquid enough to function smoothly through shocks like legislative risk and the 2023 regional banking crisis. In this episode, we talk with Matt Peterman and Ruben...

Recent research from the Congressional Budget Office suggests that an initial undercounting of undocumented migrants may help explain the surprisingly resilient US economy during the last two years. From a macroeconomic perspective, the future path of migration flows will significantly affect longer-term estimates of potential economic growth and public budget trajectories. In this episode, we tal...

The Federal Home Loan Bank system started as a Great Depression-era effort to support homeownership across the United States. Ever since, it has transformed into a vital source of liquidity for its member banks in good times and bad. In this episode, we talk with James Hotchkiss, Senior Director of Strategies and Solutions at the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago, about the FHLB system’s history,...

The labor market is at the center of overall economic activity and how the Federal Reserve understands inflation. It can be difficult to gauge underlying trends for employment and compensation, however, when some data series appear to be telling different stories. In this episode, we talk with Preston Mui, Senior Economist at Employ America, about how to understand the most important labor market...

The use of derivatives has evolved since the global financial crisis, giving banks opportunities to protect against the risks and uncertainty that stem from aggressive Fed tightening. Now that the Fed is poised to begin policy easing later this year, these tools can also help banks weather falling interest rates to support financial system stability. In this episode, we talk with Brian Matochik an...

Decades ago, the Basel Accords attempted to minimize global financial risk by standardizing regulations across major countries. The current phase of legislation, initially crafted after the global financial crisis and now dubbed the “Basel III endgame,” would impose new risk-weighted capital requirements on US banks and widen the net of financial regulation, potentially increasing costs for banks...

The shift from rock-bottom interest rates early in the pandemic to mortgage rates eclipsing 8% has caused housing inventories to plummet and demand for new housing construction to increase. As the housing market reaches somewhat of a standstill from homeowners experiencing “mortgage lock,” rising house prices make first-time homeownership increasingly less affordable. While the housing market has...

Demographics are at the core of understanding future economic growth and the long-run environment for financial institutions. Population trends, migration patterns, generational attitudes towards homeownership, and shifting approaches to retirement significantly impact loan demand, the housing market, and the macroeconomy. While some trends have accelerated during the past four years, others appea...

The banking sector managed to avoid the worst case scenarios that some predicted in March 2023. But with banks still adjusting to the Fed’s aggressive monetary tightening during the last two years, they are now shifting their attention to managing prospective rate cuts later this year. Meanwhile, the Fed’s Quantitative Tightening, Reverse Repo facility, and the 2023 Bank Term Funding Program are a...

The bond market will be adapting to some new regulations this year while also keeping an eye on some new legislative proposals in the pipeline. With November elections up in the air, the future of some provisions from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that are set to sunset next year are top of mind for many fixed income investors. In this episode, we talk with Brett Bolton, Vice President and Head of Gov...

2023 began with widespread recession forecasts, stubborn inflation, and slowing job growth. Despite higher interest rates, months of debt ceiling anxiety, and a regional banking crisis this year, the US economy managed to avoid a recession and heads into 2024 with rising hopes for a soft landing. In this episode, FHN Financial’s Chris Low and Sophia Kearney-Lederman return to the podcast to discus...

With only a couple weeks left in 2023, the economy has managed to avoid a recession that one year ago seemed inevitable. Personal consumption has been robust and the unemployment rate has stayed below 4% despite aggressive Fed tightening and inflation eroding real spending power. Households and businesses nonetheless report dour views of the economy. In this episode, we talk with Claudia Sahm, for...

The US Treasury recently increased the size of its securities auctions to help accommodate a widening Federal deficit. With the biggest pandemic stimulus bills in the rearview mirror, bond investors are worried that big deficits are no longer a temporary phenomenon. Rising interest rates, demographic changes, and a gridlocked political climate are complicating any easy path to budget reform. In th...

A primary driver of early-pandemic inflation came from a shortage of semiconductor microchips, a technology essential to everyday items like automobiles and personal electronics that is both expensive and time-intensive to produce. While semiconductor manufacturing has since managed to narrow the gap between supply and demand, US policymakers have taken steps to increase domestic independence in t...

The Federal Reserve and many market analysts have been surprised by the inflation trajectory during the pandemic; first by the persistence and intensity of inflation that began in 2021, and more recently by the improvement that has occurred without a meaningful increase in the unemployment rate. Models that rely on inflation expectations and labor market strength have had relatively weak predictiv...