Johns Hopkins Experts Available to Discuss the Federal’s Reserve Interest Rate Increase

The Federal Reserve announced Wednesday that it approved the largest interest rate increase in nearly 30 years to combat high inflation. Johns Hopkins University faculty are available to discuss what the Fed’s three-quarters of a percentage point increase means for consumers, businesses, and the economy.

Available experts include:

Laurence Ball, professor of economics. Ball is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a consultant for the International Monetary Fund. His research focuses on macroeconomics, specifically the behavior of inflation and unemployment, and monetary policy. He wrote The Fed and Lehman Brothers: Setting the Record Straight on a Financial Disaster, Money, Banking, and Financial Markets and co-wrote Macroeconomics and the Financial System.

Robert J. Barbera, director of Johns Hopkins Center for Financial Economics, lecturer, and economics department fellow. Barbera’s research focuses on the nexus between finance and macroeconomics. He wrote The Cost of Capitalism: Understanding Market Mayhem and Stabilizing Our Economic Future.

Jonathan Wright, professor of economics. Majority of his research focuses on econometrics, empirical macroeconomics and empirical finance. Wright’s interests span a wide range of topics, including forecasting in a data-rich environment, the high-frequency effects of news announcements, term structure analysis and the econometrics of weak identification.