Research and analysis of economic trends and developments
October 16, 2026
Hugo De Vere, Matthew McCormick and Srini Ramaswamy
Recent plateauing in activity involving the basis trade, in which investors buy Treasuries and sell their futures, has generated policymaker attention and questions about factors driving the shift. Among questions is the extent to which a deleveraging of Treasury holdings may be affecting demand for short-term funding.
October 15, 2026
Scott Davis, Ben Kim and Andrei Zlate
The Economist’s Big Mac Index is a measure of the real exchange rate that instead of measuring the price of a basket of goods and services, measures the price of one good, the McDonald’s Big Mac. Recent empirical work finds that financial factors, and not monetary ones, underlay a very high correlation between nominal exchange rates and the Big Mac-based real exchange rate.
October 8, 2026
Jesse Thompson and Garrett Golding
Even after the Iran conflict ends and the flow of crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz normalizes, U.S. fuel prices will likely remain unusually elevated relative to crude prices, owing to diminished refining operations. As a result, headline inflation measures could remain above where oil price trends would normally indicate for as long as a significant portion of global refining capacity stays offline.
October 6, 2026
Ben Kim, Tucker Smith and Kei-Mu Yi
The U.S. average tariff rate increased from 2.9 percent in January 2025 to 14.8 percent in December, a rise of almost 12 percentage points. The surge—the largest such U.S. jump since the Smoot-Hawley tariffs at the onset of the Great Depression in 1930—led to a sharp increase in the tariff-inclusive prices that U.S. importers paid.
September 29, 2026
Lillian Derr and Mark Wynne
There has been incredible stability in the rate of improvement in U.S. living standards over time. As first documented by Stanford economist Charles Jones, living standards, measured by GDP per capita, have risen at a pretty constant rate of about 2 percent per year in the U.S. for more than 150 years.
September 22, 2026
Samuel Dodini and Tucker Smith
Evidence suggests that generative AI (GenAI) has reduced demand for positions in which the new technology can more efficiently complete tasks than humans.
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Dallas Fed Economics
