The annual growth of real output exceeded 9% in the second quarter of 1983, and the most recent statistics suggest very strong growth in the current quarter as well. Though the inflation rate has bottomed out, it does not yet show any major reacceleration. With unemployment declining in line...

The deficit of the Federal budget dominates the attention of the public arena. The process began with President Carter's ill-fated budget announcement in February 1980. The response of the bond market revealed at the time that an increasing segment of the public recognized the futility of...

Since the last meeting of this committee, we have been experimenting with a different presentation of our forecasts of the MI - Adjusted Monetary Base Multiplier. In the past we have always constructed forecasts directly from the forecasts of the various component ratios, which come out of the...

After several years of progressively higher deficit projections, recent reports Indicate that the budget imbalance in the next several years will not be as large as projected earlier and that the FY1984 unified budget deficit will be lower than FY1983 deficit. The budget outlook could be worse,...

At the last meeting of this committee, we presented forecasts for the M 1 - Adjusted Monetary Base Multiplier in seasonally adjusted form for the first time. The seasonal adjustment was accomplished by utilizing the published seasonal factors for various components of the monety stock as...

The economy is sound structurally, but weak cyclically. The probability of recession remains relatively low, as heightened business efficiencies and the Federal Reserve's disinflationary monetary policy have reduced potentially disruptive imbalances in the economy. However, the Fed's sustained...

When the spectacular devaluation of the peso occurred at the end of 1994, 91-day swap lines of credit of $3 billion each-dollars for pesos-were available to the Bank of Mexico at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury's Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF). These were known as regular swap lines. The...

The expansion is now in its sixth year, but it remains "young" in character, reflecting the sound structure of the economy. Presently, economic performance is well balanced, with the type of characteristics that may potentially disrupt sustained growth largely absent. In particular, there are no...

Pessimism about the current economy and its near-term prospects is overstated. The economy has grown at a 2 1/2% rate for the last two years. This is slightly lower than the average for the last century, but the difference is small. Concerns about near-term prospects have encouraged a return to...

The reflexes of politicians to problems, in particular those created by their past policies, are well conditioned. This pattern holds in particular for international financial problems. Major swings in the dollar in foreign exchange markets seem reliably associated with rising demands for...