Third Quarter 1999
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

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What Credit Market Indicators Tell Us
John V. Duca

John Duca shows that interest rate spreads and loan surveys should be interpreted carefully when assessing the availability of credit and its impact on the economy. This is especially true of interest rate spread indicators, some of which reflect prepayment, liquidity, or default risk premiums that have different economic implications. It can be helpful to decompose spreads before drawing economic inferences from the structure of interest rates. Spreads between yields on non-top-grade private-sector bonds and Treasury bonds, in particular, have a large prepayment premium in addition to a time-varying default risk premium. It is also important to recognize that even some decomposed spreads include more than one type of risk premium. In this regard, a widening of some yield spreads that contain a small default risk component, such as the Aaa-Treasury spread, could reflect a rise in prepayment or liquidity risk premiums, whose magnitudes may be hard to identify separately.

Measuring the Benefits of Unilateral Trade Liberalization Part 1: Static Models
Carlos E. J. M. Zarazaga

Multilateral trade agreements generally require protracted and complicated negotiations. An obvious alternative is unilateral trade liberalization. However, would this simpler route toward free trade improve a country's welfare? This article, the first in a series of two, addresses this question using applied static models of international trade. The second article will examine the issue from the perspective of dynamic models.

In the current article, Carlos Zarazaga discusses why static models fail to produce a clear-cut case in favor of unilateral trade liberalization. He points out, however, that static models that find unilateral free trade is harmful owe this negative conclusion to a common assumption—the national product differentiation assumption—whose empirical and theoretical foundations have not yet been convincingly substantiated.

Monetary Policy Arithmetic: Some Recent Contributions
Joydeep Bhattacharya and Joseph H. Haslag

Sargent and Wallace (1981) study the feasibility of a bond-financed increase in government spending. In their "unpleasant monetarist arithmetic," Sargent and Wallace show how using bonds to finance a permanent deficit today may necessitate faster money growth in the future, yielding higher inflation today. The logic behind this spectacular result is predicated on the satisfaction of one crucial condition: the real interest rate offered on bonds has to exceed the real growth rate of the economy. Joydeep Bhattacharya and Joseph Haslag review some recent contributions to the literature on the subject in light of the contentious nature of this stricture. The authors derive the unpleasant monetarist arithmetic result by employing a weaker set of necessary conditions than those Sargent-Wallace use. In addition, the authors consider the possibility of financing the deficit by changing reserve requirements instead of raising money growth rates. Interestingly, a pleasant version of the financing arithmetic emerges.