Forward Interest Rates As Indicators Of Inflation Expectations

In the new situation with flexible exchange rates, monetary policy in Europe will have to rely more on indicators than previously under fixed rates. One of the potential indicators, the forward interest rate curve, can be used to indicate market expectations of the time-paths of future short interest rates, monetary policy, inflation rates and currency depreciation rates. The forward rate curve separates market expectations for the short, medium and long term more easily than the standard yield curve. Monetary policy in France, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden and the United States is interpreted with the help of forward rates.

Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.

The use of forward interest rates as a monetary policy indicator is demonstrated, using Sweden 1992-1994 as an example. The forward rates are interpreted as indicating market expectations of the time-path of future interest rates, future inflation rates, and future currency depreciation rates. They separate market expectations for the short-, medium-, and long-term more easily than the standard yield curve. Forward rates are estimated with an extended and more flexible version of Nelson and Siegel’s functional form.

Originally published in 1994 and the recipient of the Stonier Library Award, this volume evaluates an alternative approach – the sequential filter- to managing the uncertainty inherent in the future course of the interest rate cycle. The specific hypothesis is that the sequential filter can produce valuable signals of cyclical peaks and troughs in interest rates. The analysis focusses on US interest rates from April 1953 to December 1988.

Central banks are always concerned with keeping long-run inflation expectations well anchored at some implicit or explicit low target inflation rate. To that end, they are constantly on the lookout for indicators that can gauge those expectations accurately. One such indicator frequently reported in the specialized financial press and by central banks around the world is constructed with the forward rates technique, which exploits price differentials between government bonds of various maturities. This report examines the theory behind those indicators and assesses the extent to which they can be trusted in practice. Charts and tables.

This paper derives a set of leading indicators of inflation for Sweden. It also discusses methodological and policy issues pertaining to the estimation of these indicators. The main findings are: (1) narrow money is the most powerful leading inflation indicator; (2) broad money and inflation expectations have significant predictive information on inflation; (3) the output gap, interest rates, and the credit aggregate have some predictive information on inflation, and this information is confined to a shorter time horizon than either the monetary aggregates or inflation expectations; and (4) implied forward rates have only weak predictive information on inflation.

Do euro area inflation expectations remain well-anchored? This paper finds that the protracted period of low (and below-target) inflation in the euro area since 2013 has weakened their anchoring. Testing their sensitivity to inflation and macroeconomic news, this paper expands existing results in two key dimensions. First, by analyzing all available (advanced) inflation releases. Second, the reactions of expectations are investigated at daily, time-varying and intraday frequency regressions to add robustness to our conclusions. Results point to a significant impact of inflation news over recent years that had not been observed before in the euro area.