Has Durable Goods Spending Become Less Sensitive to Interest Rates

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)Despite an unprecedented degree of monetary policy accom- modation, including record-low interest rates, the pace of the current economic recovery has been only moderate. This moderate pace was unexpected by many forecasters and prompted ex- tensive research into the roles of credit frictions, uncertainty, and other factors. One way these factors may have weakened the recovery is by reducing the stimulative effect that a decline in interest rates usually has on spending by consumers and businesses.This article focuses on consumer spending on durable goods. It finds that the effect of interest rates on this category of spending has weakened in the current recovery. Durable goods purchases, which include residential investment as well as spending on vehicles, recre- ational goods, and household goods, are a particularly interest-sensitive component of consumer spending. In the first four years of previous recoveries, a decline in interest rates elicited a significant increase in durable goods spending. In contrast, in the first four years of the cur- rent recovery, declines in interest rates have had little impact on durable goods purchases.Reduced growth of spending on durable goods, due to the dimin- ished sensitivity of this spending to consumer and mortgage interest rates, is one factor that helps explain the moderate pace of the current recovery. If the interest-rate sensitivity had remained at the higher level that prevailed during typical recoveries in the past, declining real inter- est rates in the current recovery could have provided a stronger boost to durable goods spending. This spending, in turn, could have contrib- uted more strongly to real GDP growth a few years into the recovery, when interest rates declined rapidly. In particular, from the beginning of 2012 to midway through 2013, real GDP grew at an average annual rate of 1.8 percent, with durable goods spending contributing 0.80 per- centage point to that growth rate. Absent the weakened sensitivity of durable goods spending to lowered interest rates, both annualized GDP growth and the contribution to it from durable goods spending would each have been, on average, an estimated 0.45 percentage point higher.This reduced sensitivity of durable goods spending to interest rates may be an important consideration for policymakers. The Federal Re- serve's monetary policy affects real economic activity primarily through its influence over interest rates for consumers and businesses. The weak- ened impact of lowered interest rates on consumer spending has thus reduced the effectiveness of monetary policy in the current recovery.However, the beneficial impact on the economy of the Federal Re- serve's accommodative monetary policy stance could be greater than the direct impact of lower interest rates on aggregate spending. The policy stance could, over time, also provide substantial support to the economy indirectly, by mitigating the likely driving forces behind the diminished interest-rate sensitivity of durable goods spending. Such forces may in- clude tight credit conditions, reduced appetite for credit, reduced value of collateral, and heightened uncertainty. To the extent these driving forces are related to the economic downturn, rather than being structural in nature, the accommodative monetary policy can help mitigate them.Section I documents the moderate pace of the recovery in gen- eral and of durable goods spending in particular. Section II presents and estimates an empirical model that relates durable goods spend- ing during the first four years of recoveries to interest rates and other determinants. Section III uses a counterfactual exercise to assess the extent to which the reduced interest-sensitivity of durable goods spending has restrained GDP growth and considers the implications for monetary policy.I. THE MODERATE RECOVERYThe current recovery has been notably slower than previous recov- eries on average, both in the aggregate and in the dynamics of spending on specific durable goods. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.