Trade deficit falls sharply in May, at 13.41 bln in 5M
Greece’s trade deficit dropped sharply by 31.6 percent year-on-year (YoY) in May, after a 6.9 percent drop in April, according to data released by ELSTAT on Tuesday.
Athens steps up efforts to build links with Libya as EU steps in to assist
Increased migrant flows from Libya to southern Crete are causing the Greek government much concern. The arrival of 1,400 migrants since the weekend, has prompted Greek authorities to start talking about a humanitarian crisis as the island does not have the necessary accommodation facilities.
Government hopeful of weathering subsidy scandal despite public’s finger of blame
Almost all Greek voters believe that the government has political responsibility for the OPEKEPE scandal, according to a new opinion poll that will compound New Democracy’s concerns about the potentially lasting impact of the farming subsidy affair.
Trump Revives Trade War, Threatening Steep Aug. 1 Tariffs on Allies
President Trump said Japan and South Korea would face tariffs of 25 percent unless they reached an agreement with the United States. Other countries received notice of higher levies.
FEDS Paper: Lost in Aggregation: Geographic Mismeasurement of Income and Spending
Sinem Hacioglu-Hoke, Leo Feler, and Jack ChylakUsing zip-code median income as a proxy for household income is common in economics but can mask heterogeneity and yield misleading conclusions. Using zip-code median income and self-reported household incomes from a representative panel of 150,000 U.S. households, we decompose average retail spending for 2018-2024. When using self-reported incomes, we observe substantial divergence in spending between low- and high-income households starting in mid-2021.
FEDS Paper: Trading Costs v. Indicative Liquidity in the Off-the-Run Treasury Market
Oleg SokolinskiyThis paper estimates trading costs in the off-the-run Treasury market using comprehensive transactions data and machine learning techniques. The analysis reveals several key findings that enhance the understanding of the off-the-run Treasury market liquidity. First, the indicative bid-ask spread is shown to be a biased measure of liquidity, even when not considering transaction volume.
FEDS Paper: Gauging the Sentiment of Federal Open Market Committee Communications through the Eyes of the Financial Press
Shantanu Banerjee, Paul Cordova, Michiel De Pooter, and Olesya V. GrishchenkoWe apply natural language processing tools to news articles in the financial press to construct a sentiment index—an index of the perceived semantic orientation of monetary policy communications around scheduled Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings. To that end, we develop several dictionaries that capture various monetary policy tools: conventional monetary policy, asset purchases, and forward guidance.
FEDS Paper: Soft Landing or Stagnation? A Framework for Estimating the Probabilities of Macro Scenarios
Eric EngstromAmid ongoing trade policy shifts and geopolitical uncertainty, concerns about stagflation have reemerged as a key macroeconomic risk. This paper develops a probabilistic framework to estimate the likelihood of stagflation versus soft landing scenarios over a four-quarter horizon. Building on Bekaert, Engstrom, and Ermolov (2025), the model integrates survey forecasts, structural shock decomposition, and a non-Gaussian BEGE-GARCH approach to capture time-varying volatility and skewness.
Welcome to post-growth Europe – can anyone accept this new political reality?
TSViPhoto/ShutterstockAcross much of Europe, the engines of economic growth are sputtering. In its latest global outlook, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) sharply downgraded its forecasts for the UK and Europe, warning that the continent faces persistent economic bumps in the road.
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