en Anna Tranfaglia and Erin Troland

Historic swings in rents during the pandemic have driven increased interest in research on the financial impacts of rising rents on households. However, compared to homeowners with a mortgage, data on renters are scarce, limiting researchers' ability to analyze the 28 percent of adults who rent their home.]]> FEDS Notes Yi Li, Nick Panetta, and Weston Watts

Money market funds (MMFs) play a critical role in supplying short-term funding to corporations, banks, and governments. While existing research has made substantial progress in understanding MMF portfolio choices and investor flows, little is known about the composition of MMFs' institutional investors.]]> FEDS Notes James Wang, and Stephen Zoulalian

Buy Here Pay Here (BHPH) auto dealers occupy a unique position in the auto market by serving as both the seller and financier of vehicles to their customers. This contrasts with traditional auto dealers, who connect buyers to financing options from third-party banks, credit unions, or auto finance companies, including the captive financing arms of auto manufacturers.]]> FEDS Notes Chaehee Shin

Open-end mutual funds play a critical role in financial markets and remain major holders of key securities including corporate, Treasury, and municipal bonds. Past stress episodes have exposed the fragility of liquidity provision by corporate bond mutual funds, which can experience large investor outflows that must be met on demand despite holding relatively illiquid assets.]]> FEDS Notes Friederike Niepmann and Tim Schmidt-Eisenlohr

Trade finance encompasses a range of financial instruments and services designed to facilitate international trade. U.S. banks are key providers of these services. This note draws on several regulatory data sources to show that trade finance supports a sizeable share of international trade, is highly concentrated in large U.S. banks, and has declined over time.]]> FEDS Notes Teodora Paligorova, and Toshihide Yorozu

Outstanding mortgage debt in the commercial real estate (CRE) sector totaled $6 trillion at the end of 2024 including owner-occupied and nonowner-occupied real estate, multifamily mortgages, and loans backed by acquisition, development, and construction projects. Banks hold half of all CRE debt, with regional and small institutions (under $100 billion in assets) collectively accounting for a larger share of this lending than their larger counterparts with assets over $100 billion.]]> FEDS Notes Sam Hempel, JP Perez-Sangimino, and Jessie Jiaxu Wang

The expansion of stablecoins has moved digital payment tokens from the periphery of financial markets to the center of policy discussions. With a global market capitalization in the mid-hundreds of billions of dollars and annual settlement volumes in the trillions as of 2025, stablecoins are increasingly viewed not merely as crypto‐market infrastructure but as potential competitors to traditional transaction accounts, particularly in payment processing, settlement functionality, and as short-term stores of value for transaction balances.]]> FEDS Notes Daniel Villar

Inflation expectations are understood to play a crucial role in inflation dynamics and in the conduct of monetary policy. Recently, there has also been a renewed interest in the relationship between inflation expectations and wages.]]> FEDS Notes Trang Hoang, Carter Mix, and Madeleine Ray

In the past year, the U.S. has raised its tariffs on trading partners to a historic level. The tariff rate implied by actual tariff payments owed by importers, however, falls short of the tariff rate implied by announced policies (Gopinath and Neiman, 2026).]]> FEDS Notes Robert Minton, Madeleine Ray and Mariano Somale

Major changes in U.S. trade policy last year have led to a surge of interest in the timely assessment of the economic effects of tariffs. Minton and Somale (2025) developed a methodology to detect tariff effects on consumer prices in real time that relies solely on publicly available data.]]> FEDS Notes Francesca Carapella, Arazi Lubis, and Alexandros Vardoulakis

This note examines recent developments in the stablecoin industry and their implications for financial stability. During 2025, stablecoins have grown by about 50 percent in terms of market capitalization, with transaction volume and use in DeFi protocols also surging.]]> FEDS Notes Patrice Robitaille

With a population of 1.4 billion, India is the world's most populous country. It is also now the world's fastest growing economy and is currently the 5th largest economy measured at current exchange rates, poised to overtake Japan and Germany in coming years (Figure 1). Yet its share in the world economy is nowhere near its 20 percent share of the world's population.]]> FEDS Notes Jeffrey S. Allen

This note uses three publicly available surveys with complementary target respondents to examine trends in AI adoption in the U.S. through 2025. Business survey data from the Census Bureau show that about 18 percent of firms have adopted AI as of year-end 2025.]]> FEDS Notes Seth Murray and Ivan Vidangos

Labor force growth has been slowing and could be near-zero starting this year, driven by weak population growth reflecting low net immigration and by declining labor force participation reflecting population aging. Such weak growth in the labor force is unprecedented in the United States' recent history. In this note we highlight two significant implications of near-zero labor force growth: First, near-zero labor force growth implies that breakeven employment growth (i.e. the pace needed to maintain a steady unemployment rate) would also be near-zero—making negative job growth almost as likely as positive job growth in any given month. Second, it implies that any growth in potential GDP will need to come entirely from productivity growth. These features would represent a significant shift in U.S. labor market dynamics and the composition of economic growth.]]> FEDS Notes François de Soyres, Avani Pradhan, and Zina Saijid

Nearly six years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, headline consumer price inflation has declined substantially from its 2021–2022 peaks in the United States, the euro area, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In several economies inflation has moved closer to central bank targets, yet price pressures remain elevated across a broad set of goods and services relative to the pre-pandemic period.]]> FEDS Notes