Today I am going to talk about benchmark rates, in both fixed income and foreign exchange. This is an issue that might seem arcane to some, but like Jonathan Richman, “I keep my place in the arcane”. Benchmarks are very much at the heart of the plumbing of the financial system.
For an analysis that raises the possibility that some of these shifts reflect better job matches, see Raven Molloy, Christopher L. Smith, and Abigail K. Wozniak (2014), “Declining Migration within the U.S.: The Role of the Labor Market”, NBER Working Paper Series 20065 (Cambridge, Mass. : National Bureau of Economic Research, April).