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Economic Research

Liberty Street Economics
Stress and Strain from NBFIs to Banks
Do the recent stresses in the NBFI space—notably the bankruptcies of Tricolor and First Brands, and the decision of Blue Owl Capital Corp II (OBDC II) to end its redemption program and return capital through a wind-down of the fund—create distress for banks? The general sentiment is that the recent stresses are unlikely to amount to systemic concerns, although it does not mean there might not be “some stress and strain.” The authors show that bank stocks have been directly impacted by NBFIs yet again.
By Viral V. Acharya, Nicola Cetorelli, and Bruce Tuckman
AI generated: Hand Of A Woman Pumping Gas Into A Vehicle
Same Shock, Different Roads: A K-Shaped Pattern at the Pump
Energy prices surged to a four-year high in March 2026, driven by the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. The authors use the new consumer spending module of the Economic Heterogeneity Indicators to analyze changes in nominal and real gas consumption across different income groups. They find a K-shaped pattern emerged in gasoline consumption, showing faster consumption growth for high-income households relative to low-income households.
By Rajashri Chakrabarti, Thu Pham, Beck Pierce, and Maxim Pinkovskiy
Illustration depicting a line from China to Vietnam and from Vietnam to the U.S.
In What Ways Has U.S. Trade with China Changed?
Over the past year, U.S. trade policy with China has undergone enormous changes, but with surprisingly little effect on overall trade balances. In fact, the U.S.’s twelve-month trade deficit ended 2025 at $1.2 trillion, almost unchanged from 2024. At the same time, China’s trade surplus with the world actually increased from $1 trillion to $1.2 trillion. The authors focus on changing trade flows between the U.S., China, and countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Hunter Clark and Gregory Simitian
Explaining the K-Shaped Economy: What’s Behind the Divide?
The authors explore the reasons behind the divergence in consumer spending in which higher-income households experience faster spending growth than lower-income households. Their analysis finds that net worth has increased the most for high-income households, while inflation has risen the most for low-income households. Both factors help explain why real retail spending rose the most for high-income households.
Rajashri Chakrabarti, Thu Pham, Beck Pierce, and Maxim L. Pinkovskiy
Tracking the K-Shaped Economy: Who's Driving Spending?
Aggregate real consumer spending has risen solidly since 2023; however, it is less clear how widely shared this improvement has been across all segments of society. Systematic heterogeneity may mask the dependence of aggregate growth on a relatively small group of households. The authors use consumer spending data recently added to the New York Fed’s Economic Heterogeneity Indicators and find that retail spending growth has been driven by high-income households, with consumption exhibiting a K-shaped economy.
Rajashri Chakrabarti, Thu Pham, Beck Pierce, and Maxim L. Pinkovskiy
Bank Failures: The Roles of Solvency and Liquidity
Do banks fail because of runs or because they become insolvent? Answering this question is central to understanding financial crises and designing effective financial stability policies. Long-run historical evidence reveals that the root cause of bank failures is usually insolvency. The importance of bank runs is somewhat overstated. Runs matter, but in most cases they trigger or accelerate failure at already weak banks, rather than cause otherwise sound banks to fail.
By Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck, and Emil Verner
RESEARCH TOPICS
Applied Macroeconomics
and Econometrics Center
The mission of the Applied Macroeconomics and Econometrics Center (AMEC) is to provide intellectual leadership in the central banking community in the fields of macro and applied econometrics.

Data Releases
Global Supply Chain Pressure Index
(Updated: Monthly)

Labor Market Tightness Index
(Updated: Monthly)

Measuring the Natural Rate of Interest
(Updated: Quarterly)

Multivariate Core Trend Inflation
(Updated: Monthly)

The New York Fed DSGE Model
(Updated: Quarterly)

New York Fed Staff Nowcast
(Updated: Weekly)

Outlook-at-Risk
(Updated: Monthly)

Treasury Term Premia
(Updated: Daily)

Yield Curve as a Leading Indicator
(Updated: Monthly)
Center for Microeconomic Data
AI generated, people walking in office building.
Labor Market Tightness Index
The HPW Labor Market Tightness Index is an indicator of labor market tightness for summarizing current wage pressures and predicting wage inflation.
Photo: a four-panel picture of people cleaning up after natural disasters
Losses from Natural Disasters
Losses from Natural Disasters provides county-level estimates of the economic and human impact of extreme weather events in the United States.
Reserve Demand Elasticity (RDE)
RDE estimates provide a quantitative measure of the ampleness of reserves in the U.S. banking system in real time. New data are published monthly.
Economic Heterogeneity Indicators (EHIs)
The EHIs are broad-based economic indicators that measure macroeconomic outcomes experienced by different demographic, economic, and geographic groups on both a regional and national level.
Corporate Bond Market Distress Index (CMDI)
The CMDI is a summary metric of corporate bond market functioning based on information from multiple sources including measures of primary market issuance and pricing, secondary market pricing and liquidity conditions, and the relative pricing between traded and nontraded bonds. It updates monthly.
Regional Surveys
Monthly surveys conducted by the New York Fed track the sentiment of executives at regional manufacturing and service-sector firms regarding business conditions.

Data Releases
Empire State Manufacturing Survey
(Updated: Monthly)

Business Leaders Survey
(Updated: Monthly)

Regional Business Surveys:
Special Topics
(Updated: Quarterly)
Regional Employment Trends
These interactive charts track employment in state and metro regions in the Federal Reserve’s Second District, utilizing the New York Fed’s early benchmarks of payroll employment data. It updates monthly.
Mapping Home Price Changes
Explore year-over-year changes in home prices since 2003, both regionally and nationally, using this dynamic map — updated with new home price index data on a monthly basis. Hover over a county for granular data.
Early Benchmarked Employment Data
Monthly releases of early benchmarked employment figures for New York State, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, as well as the metropolitan areas in New York and Northern New Jersey
The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates
Labor market conditions continued to be challenging for recent college graduates at the start of 2026. The unemployment rate remained elevated at about 5.7 percent in the first quarter of 2026, though the underemployment rate edged down to 41.5 percent.
Recent Publications
Bayesian Persuasion and Cryptography
Bayesian Persuasion assumes that a sender can commit ex ante to an information structure and then release the realized signal ex post. This paper asks when that commitment technology can itself be implemented. The author defines “Receiver-Private Certified Bayesian Persuasion” and shows that this benchmark is equivalent in cryptographic power to secure two-party computation, demonstrating that hiding the signal from the sender is necessary.
Pablo D. Azar, Staff Report 1194, May 2026
Financial Shocks, Productivity, and Prices
Financial crises are frequently followed by persistent slowdowns in aggregate productivity growth. The authors study the interconnection between the productivity and pricing effects of financial shocks. They show that a tightening of credit conditions has a persistent, yet delayed, negative effect on firms’ long-run physical productivity growth while also inducing firms to change their pricing policies. Also, they demonstrate that the pricing adjustments themselves have productivity implications.
Simone Lenzu, David A. Rivers, Joris Tielens, and Shi Hu, Staff Report 1193, April 2026
Artificial Intelligence and Monetary Policy: A Framework and Perspective on Cyclical Transmission, Structural Transition, and Financial Stability
The author develops a framework analyzing how artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes monetary policy through three interrelated channels: cyclical transmission, structural transition, and financial stability. Given that central bank mandates center on price stability and financial stability, these developments place AI squarely within the domain of central banking. The author argues that AI does not call for a redefinition of central banks’ objectives, but it does require a recalibration of existing frameworks.
Simone Lenzu, Staff Report 1192, April 2026
Estimating Demand Shocks from Foot Traffic: A Big-Data Approach
Demand shocks in the service, retail trade, and health sectors are challenging to measure because output only occurs when a customer arrives at an establishment. The authors leverage high-frequency foot-traffic data to estimate demand shocks across New York City’s retail, service, and health sectors. Their analysis shows that demand dynamics in these customer-facing industries are fundamentally heterogeneous: establishments differ systematically in the persistence, volatility, and growth patterns of their demand processes.
Marina Azzimonti, David Wiczer, and Yang Xuan, Staff Report 1191, April 2026
Structural Changes in Investment and the Waning Power of Monetary Policy
Growing evidence suggests that monetary policy shocks have smaller effects on economic activity now than in the past, even putting aside issues of an effective lower bound on interest rates. The authors propose a partial explanation: secular change in both the production and composition of investment goods has weakened private investment’s role in the transmission of monetary policy to labor earnings and consumption. They demonstrate how these results may have important implications for optimal monetary policy.
Justin Bloesch and Jacob P. Weber, Staff Report 1190, March 2026
Repo and the Liquidity Risk Premium
Intermediating funds in the U.S. short-term money markets involves risk, which can be mitigated by holding buffers of liquid securities. The cost of holding these buffers, the liquidity risk premium, is driven by the opportunity cost of holding money and therefore is influenced by monetary policy. The authors use detailed data on the pricing of repurchase agreements (repo) to measure how changes in monetary policy affect the liquidity risk premium embedded in repo pricing.
Adam Copeland and Owen Engbretson, Staff Report 1189, March 2026
Intraday Price Pressure and Order Flow Around U.S. Treasury Auctions
U.S. Treasury securities attract strong investor demand, enabling the U.S. Treasury Department to issue debt at favorable rates at regular auctions. Using 33 years of intraday Treasury data, the authors provide the first high-frequency evidence on auction-day price pressure: yields rise in the hours before auction and reverse afterward. Also, net order flow dominates in explaining the pressure, providing the first direct evidence that trading transmits dealer constraints into prices.
Michael Fleming, Weiling Liu, and Giang Nguyen, Staff Report 1188, March 2026
When Long-Run Trends Are Unknown: Bond Pricing Implications
The term structure of Treasury yields is key to bond investors’ information sets and forecasts. It also helps policymakers assess economic conditions and calibrate policy stances. Central to this is the long-run neutral real rate of interest, r-star; however, r-star is inherently unobservable and must be inferred from imperfect models and data. The authors propose a new model that quantifies how much the Treasury yield curve can imply about r-star when bond investors face uncertainty about its true level.
Borel Ahonon and Guillaume Roussellet, Staff Report 1187, March 2026


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