Interest Rate Analysis And Forecasting

The focus of this book is on interest rate forecasting, and the interaction between analytical factors, political and economic developments and changes in the financial markets. The book takes an international approach with the emphasis on the USA, Germany, Japan and the UK.

Set up your own simple, one-page charts that track and assess interest rates and the factors affecting them--on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. Determine, with a high degree of accuracy, in which direction the various trends influencing interest rates are likely to push them. Supplemented by a host of charts, graphs, examples, and illustrations, Forecasting Interest Rates allows you to spot the all-important events that cause interest rates to move--whether they're front-page news or subtle incidents. It shows you how to recognize a reliable interest rate factor from a red herring--whether the source is the Department of Commerce, the Department of Labor Statistics, the Federal Reserve Board, a university research center, or a nonprofit company specializing in business economic research.

The highly prized ability to make financial plans with some certainty about the future comes from the core fields of economics. In recent years the availability of more data, analytical tools of greater precision, and ex post studies of business decisions have increased demand for information about economic forecasting. Volumes 2A and 2B, which follows Nobel laureate Clive Granger's Volume 1 (2006), concentrate on two major subjects. Volume 2A covers innovations in methodologies, specifically macroforecasting and forecasting financial variables. Volume 2B investigates commercial applications, with sections on forecasters' objectives and methodologies. Experts provide surveys of a large range of literature scattered across applied and theoretical statistics journals as well as econometrics and empirical economics journals. The Handbook of Economic Forecasting Volumes 2A and 2B provide a unique compilation of chapters giving a coherent overview of forecasting theory and applications in one place and with up-to-date accounts of all major conceptual issues. Focuses on innovation in economic forecasting via industry applications Presents coherent summaries of subjects in economic forecasting that stretch from methodologies to applications Makes details about economic forecasting accessible to scholars in fields outside economics

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.

This paper reviews, from an applied forecasting perspective, the properties of short- and long-term interest rates in an efficient market. The paper emphasizes that efficient markets do not preclude economic agents from successfully forecasting movements in short-term interest rates. For brief forecast intervals, however, ex ante changes in long-term rates are sufficiently close to zero that economic agents are not likely to improve upon the no-change prediction of the martingale model. Economic agents, in effect, are not likely to succeed in forecasting short-term movements in long-term interest rates. An analysis of three sets of Canadian interest rate forecasts provides results which are consistent with the theoretical discussion, Further, these results parallel those obtained in recent studies of recorded forecasts in the United States, although the authors of these latter studies apparently failed to appreciate the nature of their findings.

This book is an analysis of all possible interest rates. Dual expressions are used to solve long-standing puzzles, eliminate anomalies and draw conclusions about best practice and sound policy advice in areas of economics and finance. Topics include retail and corporate finance, capital budgeting and investment appraisal, bond risk management. An on-line model demonstrating ideas from the book is available in the Wolfram Demonstrations Project (WDP) by searching "multiple interest rate analysis" in the WDP search engine. A 'computable document' containing the model and the model's code are also available as free downloads from the site.

We extend the framework in Andrle and others (2013) to incorporate an explicit role for money targets and target misses in the analysis of monetary policy in low-income countries (LICs), with an application to Kenya. We provide a general specification that can nest various types of money targeting (ranging from targets based on optimal money demand forecasts to those derived from simple money growth rules), interest-rate based frameworks, and intermediate cases. Our framework acknowledges that ex-post adherence to targets is in itself an objective of policy in LICs; here we provide a novel interpretation of target misses in terms of structural shocks (aggregate demand, policy, shocks to money demand, etc). In the case of Kenya, we find that: (i) the setting of money targets is consistent with money demand forecasting, (ii) targets have not played a systematic role in monetary policy, and (iii) target misses mainly reflect shocks to money demand. Simulations of the model under alternative policy specifications show that the stronger the ex-post target adherence, the greater the macroeconomic volatility. Our findings highlight the benefits of a model-based approach to monetary policy analysis in LICs, including in countries with money-targeting frameworks.

An overview of the macroeconomic forecasting industry in the United States that explains and evaluates the forecasting techniques used to make predictions about various aspects of the national economy.