US Monetary Policy Announcements Research Articles

Monetary policy and Bitcoin

I empirically study the impact of monetary policy on Bitcoin, and show that is has evolved over time. First, based on high-frequency data, the paper documents that Bitcoin prices did not immediately respond to US monetary policy announcements in the past; they only started doing so in late 2020, in a manner similar to other risky asset prices. Second, based on a structural VAR analysis I study the impact of monetary policy over longer horizons. I confirm the contractionary impact of a US monetary tightening in the post-2020 time period, but show that, historically, a US tightening used to persistently increase rather than decrease Bitcoin prices. To explain this result, I exploit spreads in Bitcoin valuations across currencies and blockchain data and link increased Bitcoin demand to East Asian economies subject to capital controls, particularly China. I discuss implications for the discussion of where demand for Bitcoin stems from: its recent responses to monetary policy confirm its role as a primarily speculative asset; yet, at least historically Bitcoin seems to have derived part if its value from enabling cross-border value transfers and capital flight.

GCC countries' market risk premia and US monetary policy announcements

PurposeThis paper aims to examine if the market risk premiums of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are particularly higher on prescheduled US monetary policy announcement days. The findings shed light on the causality relationship from the state of the global economy to the GCC equity markets as well as their integration with the rest of the world.Design/methodology/approachThe author takes the standard event-study approach, following Fama et al. (1969). As the announcement days are prescheduled, the impact of the announcements on the GCC markets' risk premia allows for test of causality, while other studies address predictability and association.FindingsThe author finds that excess returns are higher, both economically and statistically, on announcement days in most individual GCC countries and the region overall. Moreover, additional compensations may not appear on the exact days of announcement in a few countries; rather, on the days right before or after announcements, possibly due to information leakage or gradual diffusion. My results show that there is a causal relationship from the state of the global economy to the GCC equity markets' risk premia. This new evidence supports integration between the Gulf region's and the world's financial markets.Practical implicationsThe evidence of risk–return transmission from US monetary policy announcements to GCC countries' equity indices supports integration between the region's and the world's financial markets. The study results will help guide investors' and corporations' investing, capital budgeting and portfolio evaluation decisions.Originality/valueThis paper extends the announcement literature (Savor and Wilson 2013, 2014) by examining the responses of the GCC countries, the major players of the global oil markets. The empirical analysis documents a causal relationship from the state of the global economy, as revealed by US monetary policy announcements, to the GCC equity indices. This new evidence supports increased integration between the Gulf region and the world, a finding that investors and corporations should consider when making investing, capital budgeting and portfolio evaluation decisions.

The Impact of US Monetary Policy Announcements on Equity Prices: Evidence from Borsa Istanbul

This study examines the effect of FOMC's (Federal Open Market Committee) announcements on the volatility of stock returns in the Borsa Istanbul (BIST) from January 4, 2000 to May 31, 2019. We find that FOMC's news increases the market level of volatility on announcement days but cannot find any evidence that it had a destabilizing effect on the Turkish stock market over our observation period. We also look at the effect of FOMC's news on the return volatility of the BIST100 index over different states of the stock market and find that FOMC's announcement days give a lift to conditional volatility both in bull periods and bear periods, but find no evidence of destabilizing impact. On the contrary, both positive announcement and negative announcement shocks in bull periods are found to depress volatility on consecutive days. In other words, FOMC's announcements in bull periods have a stabilizing effect on equity prices rather than a destabilizing in the BIST100 index.

Monetary policy after the crisis: A threat to hedge funds' alphas?

We examine the effects of US monetary policy announcements during and after the Great Financial Crisis on the average abnormal returns (the “alpha”) of the hedge fund industry as a whole and of a range of hedge strategy indices. We apply a variety of tests of increasing sophistication including simple event studies, formal tests for breaks, and Markov switching models. The event studies show that both the overall index and long-short equity and fixed income arbitrage hedge strategies were systematically affected by unexpected monetary policy announcements, while other strategies appear to have been less impacted. Formal break point tests show that for all strategies as well as the overall index, there is evidence of five breakpoints. For the overall index and most of the sub-indices, many of the endogenously determined breaks closely match a list of policy surprise dates that have been already singled out because they had strongly affected financial markets in general. Especially for the long-short equity, fixed income arbitrage, dedicated short-bias, and global macro hedge funds, there is a significant tendency for estimated alphas to decline over time, following policy surprises, while we find no clear-cut evidence of systematic risk beta timing skills.

Impact of monetary policy on the Indian stock market: Does the devil lie in the detail?

Although the link between the stock market and monetary policy is nebulous in the Indian context, it is perceived to be significant in popular perception. Towards explaining this disconnect, we probe the impact of Indian and US monetary policy announcements on disaggregated sectoral stock indices using the identification through heteroscedasticity approach. Our findings suggest differential impact of monetary policy on stocks across sectors. Illustratively, in terms of monetary policy surprises, the impact on the stocks of banking and financial services as well as the realty sector turns out to be significant. In contrast, sectors like media, metal, pharmaceuticals, information technology or fast moving consumer goods are found to be unresponsive. Interestingly, US unconventional monetary policy (quantitative easing) measures are found to have an impact on fast moving consumer goods and the media sector. These findings are attributed to: (1) dominance of the bank lending channel; (2) predominance of public sector vis-a-vis private banks; (3) significant influence of monetary policy on demand for housing and automobiles; (4) relative ineffectiveness of the asset-price channel of monetary transmission; and (5) sector-specific affects arising out of financial liberalisation.

Cryptocurrency reaction to FOMC Announcements: Evidence of heterogeneity based on blockchain stack position

We examine the response of a broad set of digital assets to US Federal Fund interest rate and quantitative easing announcements, specifically examining associated volatility spillover and feedback effects. We classify each digital asset into one of three categories: Currencies; Protocols; and Decentralised Applications (dApps). Currency-based digital assets experience idiosyncratic spillovers in the period immediately after US monetary policy announcements, while application or protocol-based digital assets are largely immune to policy volatility spillover and feedback. Mineable digital assets are found to be more susceptible to monetary policy volatility spillovers and feedback than non-mineable. Responses indicate a diverse market within which, not all assets are comparable to Bitcoin.

Cryptocurrency Reaction to FOMC Announcements: Evidence of Heterogeneity Based on Blockchain Stack Position

We examine the response of a broad set of digital assets to US Federal Fund interest rate and quantitative easing announcements, specifically examining associated volatility spillover and feedback effects. We classify each digital asset into one of three categories: Currencies; Protocols; and Decentralised Applications (dApps). Currency-based digital assets experience idiosyncratic spillovers in the period immediately after US monetary policy announcements, while application or protocol-based digital assets are largely immune to policy volatility spillover and feedback. Mineable digital assets are found to be more susceptible to monetary policy volatility spillovers and feedback than non-mineable. Responses indicate a diverse market within which, not all assets are comparable to Bitcoin.

US macroannouncements and international asset pricing

AbstractThe world capital asset‐pricing model is the benchmark model in international finance. However, recent research finds that the premium on the world market factor is insignificant. In this paper, we investigate if the world market risk premium is particularly significant on US macroeconomic announcement days. Empirically, we apply the methodology to daily country exchange‐traded funds. Our findings suggest that although the world market risk premium is insignificant on nonannouncement days, it is strongly significant on US macroeconomic announcement days. In addition, we find that US monetary policy announcements are the most important macroeconomic announcements to drive the world market risk premium. Our findings are consistent with the notion of monetary policy uncertainty and the empirical literature that connects policy uncertainty with systematic risk.

The Effects of US Unconventional Monetary Policies in Latin America

This paper offers an empirical analysis of the way in which US unconventional monetary policy has affected Latin American countries. First, we estimate the effects of US monetary policy announcements on sovereign bond interest rates, exchange rates and stock market indices for a set of emerging countries, including five Latin American economies. We find that QE announcements in 2008/2009 and the “tapering talk” in 2013 generated sizable sovereign yield and exchange rate fluctuations. We further find some excess response of Latam asset prices that disappear once we take into account their country characteristics. In the second part of the paper we estimate a simple model that measures the influence of country-specific macroeconomic fundamentals on the transmission of US financial disturbances. An estimated model including the inflation rate, the CDS spread, the ratio of official reserves and market capitalisation explains some of the observed cross-country heterogeneity of spillovers from US monetary policy announcements. Under this model, a greater impact from the normalisation of US monetary policy can be expected in Latin America relative to other emerging economies.

International interest rates and US monetary policy announcements: Evidence from Hong Kong and Singapore

This paper investigates the responses of market interest rates to US monetary policy announcements for the US and two emerging economies, Hong Kong and Singapore which are similar on many respects but have experienced opposite exchange rate regimes in the last twenty years. Our results, based on market expectations extracted from federal fund futures rates, document that FOMC announcements significantly affect the term structure of interest rate in the US and both Asian countries. Further, international interest rate differentials around FOMC meeting dates tend to be negative for short maturities with the impact gradually dissipating as bond maturity increases. Finally, for the case of Singapore, we find that domestic interest rates react to both external and domestic monetary policy announcements with a magnitude that is larger over the full bond maturity spectrum for domestic announcements. These results are robust to time-varying futures risk premia and alternative measures of interest rates expectations.

S&P 500 implied volatility and monetary policy announcements

While many studies have investigated the link between macroeconomic events and equity market volatility, few have considered the impact on option implied volatilities. Given the recent focus on trading in implied volatility, in the context of the S&P 500 VIX index, this paper examines how the VIX index behaves around US monetary policy announcements. It is revealed that the VIX index falls significantly on the day of Federal Open Market Committee meetings.

US monetary policy announcements and Irish stock market volatility

The influence of foreign monetary policy decisions on the volatility of the Irish stock market is investigated. Specifically, the influence of US monetary policy announcements on the ISEQ is examined. Evidence of the so-called calm before the storm is found, i.e., there appears to be a decline in volatility on the day prior to an FOMC meeting and a subsequent increase in volatility after the results of the FOMC meeting is made known. Also evidence is found to suggest that ISEQ volatility is influenced by surprise changes in US monetary policy. Moreover, US monetary surprises appear to affect Irish stock return volatility asymmetrically with a surprise tightening of US monetary policy leading to an increase in Irish stock return volatility. This paper represents an important step in addressing the issues of spillover identification between the USA and the Irish stock market.

US Monetary Policy Announcements and the Term Structure of Interest Rate Differentials: Evidence from Hong Kong and Singapore

This paper investigates the effect of US monetary policy announcements on the term structure of US interest rate differentials with Hong Kong and Singapore. US monetary policy surprises on domestic and international interest rates are measured by using data from short-term interest rate futures markets in all three countries around the FOMC meetings dates. Our results, based on careful treatment of interest rate endogeneity and time-varying risk premia in the futures markets, document that US monetary policy announcements significantly affect the behavior of the term structure of interest rates in the US and in both Asian countries. The implications of these results in light of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates (EHTS) are also discussed.