What the market thinks is most likely to occur is not necessarily what the market expects to occur. This paper explains why most of the surveys of federal funds rate outlook deviate substantially from the true market expectation, especially as the forecast horizon increases. Surveys often ask participants for their forecast of the 'most likely outcome', which differs from the expected outcome. The latter has to take into account not only the most likely outcome but also those less likely to occur, that is, weighing all the possible outcomes by their probabilities. In a tightening (easing) cycle, the most likely outcome tends to be higher (lower) than the expected outcome, leading to a false impression that the fed will tighten (ease) more than what the market expects. It is only when the chances of rate hikes and rate cuts are roughly balanced that surveys reflect the true market expectation.
Market sentiments influence the dynamics of Hong Kong’s macro‐critical property market, but the unobservable nature of market sentiments makes it difficult to systemically assess this sentiment channel. Using text mining techniques, this paper sets up a news‐based property market sentiment index and a Google Trends‐based buyer incentive index for Hong Kong and studies the sentiment channel of transmission in the Hong Kong property market. The news‐based property market sentiment index can reflect the change in sentiments in past key events, with the sentiments in the primary market tending to lead that of the secondary market during the low housing supply period. For the Google Buyer Incentive Index, we find that it has value‐added in forecasting (or nowcasting) the official property price index. In mapping out the sentiment channel using a structural vector‐autoregressive model, we find that an improvement in market sentiments could stimulate buyers’ incentives, which then together would affect property prices and transaction volumes.
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