Monetary Policy Shocks: A New Hope. Large Language Models and Central Bank Communication

I develop a multi-agent LLM framework that processes Federal Reserve communications to construct narrative monetary policy surprises. By analyzing Beige Books and Minutes released before each FOMC meeting, the system generates conditional expectations that yield less noisy surprises than market-based measures. These surprises produce theoretically consistent impulse responses where contractionary shocks generate persistent disinflationary effects and enable profitable yield curve trading strategies that outperform alternatives. By directly extracting expectations rather than cleaning surprises ex post, this approach demonstrates how multi-agent LLMs can implement narrative identification at scale without contamination in high-frequency measures.