Macroeconomic News and Real Interest Rates

Economic news affects the perceptions of investors, forecasters, and policymakers about the strength or weakness of the economy. These expectations are updated on the basis of regularly occurring surprises in macroeconomic announcement data. The response of asset prices to positive or negative announcement surprises has been a regular feature of the literature for more than 20 years. In this vein, the authors evaluate the responses of the yield of 10-year Treasury inflation-indexed securities to nearly three dozen macroeconomic announcements. They find that the real long-term rate of interest responds positively to surprises in a handful of key macroeconomic indicators, including labor productivity growth. Also, the authors find no support for the proposition that the Federal Reserve has information about its actions or the state of the real economy that is not in the public domain and, hence, not already priced in the real long-term interest rate.