The Fed's Intentions

As we all know, there is a debate going on in the market about whether or not inflation has finally started to recede and therefore the Federal Reserve can start to let up on the brake pedal and — this seems a stretch — even start lowering interest rates and easing monetary policy in the near future.

Right now, those who believe the Fed is done tightening are winning the debate, witness the sharp rise in equity prices over the past two months. But at the same time several Fed officials have been warning that they are not done tightening yet — not by a long shot — and that more rate hikes are in the offing.

Notably, Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari said last week that “there’s a disconnect between me and the markets,” adding that it was “not realistic” that the Fed would be lowering rates in the next six to nine months.

St. Louis Fed President James Bullard was equally blunt, telling the Wall Street Journal that he would “lean toward” another 75-basis point rate hike at the Fed’s next scheduled meeting beginning September 20. He said he expects high inflation “to prove more persistent than what many parts of Wall Street think.”

Yet many investors don’t believe them.

Does this mean that the Fed needs to make a much stronger message about its intentions, or is it content to let the market do what it wants to do and suffer the consequences if it has misjudged? Or are these investors correct in their assumptions?

Throughout his tenure, Fed Chair Jerome Powell has been not only market friendly but also keen on making sure the market understands what the Fed is up to. He doesn’t want any surprises. So does this mean that he is ok with what the market is doing, or if it’s wrong in reading the Fed, does he need to make a much clearer message?

Later this week the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City will host its annual Jackson Hole Economic Symposium in Wyoming. That seems like a good time for Powell to make it more crystal clear what the Fed’s intention are. Continue reading "The Fed's Intentions"

Has the Fed Already Whipped Inflation?

To hear Jeremy Siegel tell it, the Federal Reserve has already won its fight over inflation and should start taking its foot off the monetary brakes.

“I think the Fed should be near the end of its tightening cycle,” the ubiquitous market prognosticator and Wharton School finance professor told CNBC last week. According to Siegel, current headline inflation may still be high, “but forward-looking inflation has really been stopped. And I think the Fed should really slow down the rate of hiking, and if we get a snapback in productivity that’ll put further downward pressure” on inflation.

Is he right, or is it just wishful thinking so stocks can resume their decade-long winning streak?

Right now the signals look mixed, based on the two most important and widely-followed economic reports issued last week.
According to the Commerce Department, second quarter GDP fell 0.9% at an annual rate, on top of the prior quarter’s 1.6% decline.

Until this year, the mainstream media would have immediately pounced on that as clear evidence that we are officially in a recession, following the traditional definition of a downturn as two back-to-back negative quarters. Now, however, with a feckless president poised to lead his party to an election Armageddon in November, we learn that the old standard simply doesn’t apply anymore, so we can’t use the dreaded “R” word.

Whether that’s pure bias or pure something else that also begins with a B, July’s robust jobs report, which showed the economy added a much higher than expected 528,000 jobs, does create some doubt whether we are in a recession or not, and if so, what the Fed plans to do about it.

Instead of viewing the jobs report as good news being bad news – i.e., the Fed will need to continue tightening to stifle economic growth—and sell stocks, the market instead went up on Friday and continued to rally on Monday morning. Is the recession – if there ever was one – now officially over, the inflation monster slain and no further need for the Fed to continue to raise interest rates? Continue reading "Has the Fed Already Whipped Inflation?"

Should We Prepare For An Aggressive U.S. Fed?

Traders expect the U.S. Fed to soften as Chairman Powell suggested they have reached a neutral rate with the last rate increase. The US stock markets started an upward trend after the last 75bp rate increase – expecting the U.S. Fed to move toward a more data-driven rate adjustment.

My research suggests the U.S. Federal Reserve has a much more difficult battle ahead related to inflation, global market concerns, and underlying global monetary function.

Simply put, global central banks have printed too much money over the past 7+ years, and the eventual unwinding of this excess capital may take aggressive controls to tame.

Real Estate Data Shows A Sudden Shift In Forward Expectations

The US housing market is one of the first things I look at in terms of consumer demand, home-building expectations, and overall confidence for consumers to engage in Big Ticket spending. Look at how the US Real Estate sector has changed over the past five years.

The data comparison chart below, originating from September 2017, shows how the US Real Estate sector went from moderately hot in late 2017 to early 2018; stalled from July 2018 to May 2019; then got super-heated in late 2019 as extremely low-interest rates drove buyers into a feeding frenzy.

As the COVID-19 virus initiated the US lockdowns in March/April 2020, you can see the buying frenzy ground to a halt. Between March 2020 and July 2020, Average Days On Market shot up from -8 to +17 (YoY) – showing people stopped buying homes. At this same time, home prices continued to rise, moving from +3.3% to +14% (YoY) by the end of 2020. Continue reading "Should We Prepare For An Aggressive U.S. Fed?"

Are We Returning To Normal?

It may be time to start thinking that this recent bout of high inflation won’t really last as long as we thought.

Right now the outlook is starting to look fairly positive: Oil prices are coming down, the chip crisis seems to be over — the shortage has quickly turned into a glut — supply chain problems have eased.

At the same time, technology will continue to make things more efficient, just as it did before the Covid-19 lockdown, thus easing price pressures.

Retailers are overloaded with inventory and are already unloading it at steep discounts. And stores can only raise prices so much before consumers say no. Do I really need that $6 box of cereal? Probably not.

Does this mean the Federal Reserve won't need to be as aggressive in raising rates as we thought? Was the Fed - dare I say it — correct after all in believing that inflation was transitory, and the only thing they got wrong was how long that temporary period would be and how high inflation would rise?

Maybe it won't be as long as most everyone thinks. Like most things lately in the U.S. — climate, Covid, the economy — crises never turn out to be as bad as the panic-mongers would have us believe.

Indeed, consumers don’t appear as worried about inflation as most people think. Consumer confidence numbers have dropped sharply, it’s true, but retail sales have held up, witness the 1.0% rebound in June after falling 0.1% the prior month, according to last Friday’s report.

That’s mainly because we still have a robust job market and incomes continue to rise, maybe not at the same rate as inflation but not far behind. The economy added 372,000 jobs in June, down slightly from May’s gain of 384,000 but 100,000+ more than forecasts.

The unemployment rate remained near the 50-year low of 3.6% and about where it was before the pandemic. Most importantly, perhaps, average hourly earnings rose 5.1% in June from a year earlier, not far below the core inflation rate of 5.9%.

Does this mean we’re out of the inflationary woods that our monetary and fiscal authorities have largely created by flooding the economy with money when it wasn’t totally necessary? I wouldn’t go that far.

While income gains seem to be running only a little behind the rate of inflation, the same can’t be said for interest rates. On Friday the yield on the U.S. Treasury’s benchmark 10-year note had fallen below 3.0%. Can the Fed realistically get inflation down to its target rate of 2% if inflation is double that on long-term bond yields? It doesn’t seem possible.

However, it’s useful to note that other bellwether rates have risen closer to the rate of inflation, thanks to the threat/promise of more Fed rate hikes. Specifically, the average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage in June hit 5.52%, according to Freddie Mac, more than 200 basis points above where it stood at the beginning of the year.

That’s certainly not good news if you’re planning to finance the purchase of a house soon, but it does stand the possibility of removing some of the froth from the housing market — both purchases and rentals — that is keeping many young people from starting out on their own. Long term, that’s a good thing.

More than any other statistic, perhaps, housing costs were an area where the Fed proved woefully inept in measuring inflation over the past decade or so.

Ever since the global financial crisis of 2008, the Fed banged its collective head against the wall trying to raise the inflation rate to 2%, while all along inflation was running well above that, if only the Fed’s army of Ivy League-trained economists had paid attention to what was going on around them in home prices and rents.

So where does that leave us? Is the Fed going to stop tightening because inflation may appear to be under control? No, nor should it.

For the past 15 years or so, ever since the end of the global financial crisis in 2008, we’ve heard constant pleas (including from yours truly) that monetary policy needs to “normalize,” meaning to some traditional, pre-2008 level of interest rates. Alas, it never came to pass.

The post-crisis economic growth rate was never strong enough to persuade the Fed to ease monetary policy and raise interest rates significantly. Then we had the pandemic, which moved everything back to square one, with Fed policy going well beyond where it had ever gone before.

Now, with the economy still growing fairly strongly despite multiple obstacles — supply chain disruptions, war in Ukraine, inflation — that should give the Fed comfort to continue to raise rates and reduce its balance sheet without overly disrupting consumers, who continue to travel, eat at restaurants, and go to ballgames.

Let’s hope it doesn’t lose its nerve as it has multiple times before. That should be a boon to stocks, which could certainly use a lift.

It’s time to get back to normal.

George Yacik
INO.com Contributor

Disclosure: This article is the opinion of the contributor themselves. The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. This contributor is not receiving compensation (other than from INO.com) for their opinion.

Wishful Thinking

Relax, folks. There isn't going to be a long recession, if there is one at all, and you're probably not going to lose your job, and inflation will be down below 3% by next year. The Fed’s got your back.

That's the story from the Federal Reserve’s incredibly optimistic projections released after the end of Wednesday's interest rate-setting meeting. I use the word “incredibly” deliberately, because these projections seem anything but credible. But we can hope.

Somewhat lost in the release of the Fed's 75 basis-point hike in the federal funds rate last Wednesday is that U.S. GDP growth will remain fairly positive this year, next year, and into 2024, according to the Fed’s latest projections.

The Fed now forecasts U.S. GDP will grow by 1.7% this year as well as in 2023, rising to 1.9% in 2024. Now those are down from the Fed’s March projections, to be sure, but they still remain above recessionary (i.e., negative) levels.

Likewise, the Fed is projecting that the unemployment rate will end this year at 3.7% and 3.9% next year, before rising to 4.1% in 2024. Again, those are worse than the March projections but not overly so, considering all the scare talk about how the Fed’s newly hawkish rate-rising policy will inevitably cause a recession and a jump in unemployment.

Meanwhile the Fed is also projecting that the PCE inflation rate will end 2022 at 5.2% before dropping in half to 2.6% next year and to 2.3% in 2024, again higher than its March projections but dramatically lower than where we are today at more than 8%.

How does the Fed plan to manage all this, you ask? It sees the fed funds rate reaching 3.4% by the end of this year and 3.8% in 2022, again above its March projections but a lot lower than what you would have expected, given that the yield on the two-year Treasury note is already well above 3%.

In other words, the Fed is merely playing catch-up to where the market has already been for a while.

All in all, I would say, a pretty positive story, a lot better than what we had been expecting. But how much of it can be believed? What the Fed is telling us is that it believes it can really engineer a soft landing, meaning only a moderate rise in the unemployment rate and no recession, at the cost of just slightly higher interest rates, at least compared to today’s inflation rate and current bond market rates.

In other words, the Fed says it can tame inflation back down to less than 3% all while leaving interest rates five percentage points below the current 8% inflation rate. Is that possible?

Meanwhile, what is President Biden doing for his part in trying to drive down inflation? Other than not interfering with Fed policy, which he claims is basically all he can do, he is blaming oil executives for the high price of gasoline.

Short of charging them with getting in bed with Vladimir Putin, he's laying the blame for high energy prices on their failure to explore and drill for oil, leaving out his administration's role in basically forbidding them to do just that and putting pressure, through the Fed and other means, not to lend them money in order for them to do so.

You would think Biden would have been happy that they are not drilling for oil, contributing as they are to the blissful carbon-free future he imagines. But he seems to believe he can have it both ways, namely no new oil production and low gas prices. But I guess that’s the same type of logic the Fed is using in trying to convince us it can whip inflation with a few interest rate hikes with little harm to the overall economy.

The market reaction to all this was fairly predictable. Right after the Fed rate announcement was greeted with euphoria on Wednesday, people woke up the next morning and said, “Hey, wait a minute. This can't possibly be true,” and the selling resumed with renewed fervor.

And why not? Can we take any comfort in what the Fed and our government are telling us, which is that after a dozen years of easy money, quantitative easing, artificially low interest rates, and massive fiscal and monetary stimulus, they can undo all that in a year or so without anyone being inconvenienced?

If only it worked that easily. If Powell wanted to be honest, he could have said, “Folks, there will be a lot of pain over the next couple of years to undo all we have done over the past decade, so brace yourselves for it.”

But people don’t want to hear that, especially in an election year. Although the market seems to know better.

Visit back to read my next article!

George Yacik
INO.com Contributor

Disclosure: This article is the opinion of the contributor themselves. The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. This contributor is not receiving compensation (other than from INO.com) for their opinion.