Research Topics

This paper analyzes the dynamics of long-term US Treasury security yields from a Keynesian perspective using daily data. Keynes held that the short-term interest rate is the main driver of the long-term interest rate. In this paper, the daily changes in long-term Treasury security yields are empirically modeled as a function of the daily changes in the short-term interest rate and other important financial variables to test Keynes’s hypothesis. The use of daily data provides a long time series. It enables the extension of earlier Keynesian models of Treasury security yields that relied on quarterly and monthly data. Models based on higher-frequency daily data from financial markets—such as the ones presented in this paper—can be valuable to investors, financial analysts, and policymakers because they make it possible for a real-time fundamental assessment of the daily changes in long-term Treasury security yields based on a wide range of financial variables from a Keynesian perspective. The empirical findings of this paper support Keynes’s view by showing that the daily changes in the short-term interest rate are the main driver of the daily changes in the long-term interest rate on Treasury securities. Other financial variables, such as the daily changes in implied volatility of equity prices and the daily changes in the exchange rate, are found to have some influence on Treasury yields.

What Should BNDES Do?

The 2007–8 global financial crisis has shown the failure of private finance to efficiently allocate capital to finance real capital development. The resilience and stability of Brazil’s financial system has received attention, since it navigated relatively smoothly through the Great Recession and the collapse of the shadow banking system. This raises the question of whether it is possible that the alternative approaches followed by some developing countries might provide an indication of more stable regulatory approaches generally. There has been much discussion about how to support private long-term finance in order to meet Brazil’s growing infrastructure and investment needs. One of the essential functions of the financial system is to provide the long-term funding needed for long-lived and expensive capital assets. However, one of the main difficulties of the current private financial system is its failure to provide long-term financing, as the short-termism in Brazil’s financial market is a major obstacle to financing long-term assets. In its current form, the National Economic and Social Development Bank (BNDES) is the main source of long-term funding in the country. However, BNDES has been subject to a range of criticisms, such as crowding out private sector bank lending, and it is said to be hampering the development of the local capital market. This paper argues that, rather than following the traditional approach to justify the existence of public banks—and BNDES in particular, based on market failures—finding an effective answer to this question requires a theory of financial instability.