NEW YORK—The Federal Reserve Bank of New York today released a new issue of the Economic Policy Review, volume 23, number 2. The Economic Policy Review is a policy-oriented journal focused on macroeconomic, banking and financial market topics. The articles in this issue—"The New York Fed Staff Underlying Inflation Gauge," "An Overview of the Survey of Consumer Expectations" and "The Development of the Government Securities Clearing Corporation"—focus on the distinct topics of trend inflation, consumer expectations and the history of the Government Securities Clearing Corporation, respectively.
The New York Fed Staff Underlying Inflation Gauge
This article introduces the New York Fed Staff Underlying Inflation Gauge (UIG), explains its construction and covers the New York Fed's past experiences with daily, real-time updates of the UIG, which have been made internally since 2005. The UIG was constructed to provide an estimate of the trend, or persistent, component of inflation. It includes a wide range of nominal, real and financial variables in addition to prices. The UIG has proved especially useful in detecting turning points in trend inflation and has outperformed core inflation measures in forecast accuracy. Of note, the New York Fed launched the monthly publication of the UIG measure in September 2017.
An Overview of the Survey of Consumer Expectations
This is an overview of the New York Fed's Survey of Consumer Expectations, a monthly online survey of a rotating panel of household heads. The survey collects timely information on consumers' expectations and decisions on topics including inflation, household finance, the labor market and the housing market. It aims to measure consumer expectations at a high frequency, understand how these expectations are formed and look into the link between expectations and behavior. The article covers the origins, design and implementation of the survey, as well as the computation of various statistics that are released every month. It also explains how the results are disseminated and how the micro data can be accessed.
The Development of the Government Securities Clearing Corporation
This paper traces the evolution of the Government Securities Clearing Corporation (GSCC), which was established in 1986 and is now part of the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation, a unit of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. The article describes the events that led to GSCC's formation, developments that increased its efficiency and reduced risk, and steps taken to expand its services.
The first article is written by Marlene Amstad, Simon Potter and Robert Rich. Amstad is a former research fellow, Potter is an executive vice president and head of the Markets Group, and Rich is an assistant vice president in the Research and Statistics Group at the New York Fed.
The second article is written by Olivier Armantier, Giorgio Topa, Wilbert van der Klaauw and Basit Zafar. Armantier is an assistant vice president, Topa is a vice president, van der Klaauw is a senior vice president and Zafar is a former research officer in the New York Fed's Research and Statistics Group.
The third article is written by Jeffrey F. Ingber, a former senior vice president in the New York Fed's Supervision Group.
