When analysing time series data in R, I often draw on a small set of helper functions to quickly visualise information. These use the excellent plotly package to create interactive charts. I thought others might find these useful as well and decided to put the code up here. This post provides a quick rundown of how these functions work.
I spend a lot of time looking at how the Bank of Japan (BOJ) manages financial institutions' current account balances, more commonly known as “reserves”. The amount and price of these reserves influence financial institutions' net income, so discussions on the BOJ's monetary policy options often look at how these could be tweaked. RStudio's Shiny package is a great tool to make sense of it all.
Sometimes, I need a quick overview of a large dataset for a particular economy. For example, I might want to examine all the available data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) for the U.K. Compiling the relevant data from their various datasets can be quite the task, so making the process replicable is key. This post shows you how to set up an interactive BIS data dashboard using R Markdown, and flexdashboard together with the BIS R package.
When the European Central Bank hosted its annual Forum on Central Banking in Sintra, Portugal earlier this year, one presentation at the Young Economists' Session stood out to me: Cían Allen's research on current accounts and sectoral balances. His paper prompted me to dig up some code I wrote during my dissertation to compile sectoral balances data for a number of economies and update it with some additional data for the US and Japan.
After looking at the balance sheets of the US Fed and the Bank of Japan (BOJ) a while ago, let's take a look at the balance sheets of the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BOE) next. These four central banks have all dabbled in quantitative easing in recent years, so comparing their balance sheets should bring to light some interesting similarities and differences.
Five years have passed since the Bank of Japan (BOJ) rolled out its quantitative and qualitative easing (QQE) programme in April 2013 under Governor Kuroda. After taking a closer look at the US Fed's balance sheet a few weeks back, I decided to do the same for the BOJ's balance sheet to see what we can learn.
Ten years ago, the U.S. Fed launched the first of several rounds of Quantitative Easing in response to the Global Financial Crisis. This drastically increased the size of its balance sheet. Since then, the Fed has been looking to roll back this expansion in an effort to “normalise” monetary policy. Let's see what this looks like.
Mozilla's Thunderbird email client is a stellar piece of software backed by a great community. But one of the few things that don't work well for me straight out of the box is its default font size. The default font is rather small, which can be a problem on high-res “Retina” displays. Here's how you adjust the default settings.
If you're frequently working with text documents created on Windows, chances are you've encountered the Calibri and Cambria fonts, which became the default in Microsoft Office 2007. These fonts are TrueType typefaces, so if you have access to the original .ttf/.ttc files (perhaps through an Office license), you can easily use them on your favourite Linux distribution. However, a common issue with these fonts on Linux is poor rendering. Some characters might appear stronger than others, which can be quite distracting. This happens because Microsoft has embedded poor-quality bitmaps in their fonts. Fortunately, you can configure your system to ignore these embedded bitmaps. Here's how.
A common way to compare financial systems across countries is by looking at the role banks play in providing credit to the real economy. The[Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has great data on credit across countries, making this kind of comparison very easy to do. Plotting the share of bank credit relative to total credit across time reveals some interesting patterns.