Jerome Powell, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, speaks during a Fed Listens event in Washington, D.C., US, on Friday, Sept. 23, 2022.
Al Drago | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Political questioning of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell about the central bank’s policy moves is intensifying, this time from the other side of the aisle.
No stranger to political pressure, the Fed chief this week found himself the focus of concern in a letter from Sen. Sherrod Brown. The Ohio Democrat warned in the letter about potential job losses from the Fed’s rate hikes that it is using to combat inflation.
“It is your job to combat inflation, but at the same time you must not lose sight of your responsibility to ensure that we have full employment,” Brown wrote. He added that “potential job losses brought about by monetary over-tightening will only worsen these matters for the working class.”
The letter comes with the Fed less than a week away from its two-day policy meeting that is widely expected to conclude Nov. 2 with a fourth consecutive 0.75 percentage point interest rate increase. That would take the central bank’s benchmark funds rate to a range of 3.75% to 4%, its highest level since early 2008 and represents the fastest pace of policy tightening since the early 1980s.
Without recommending a specific course of action, Brown asked Powell to remember the Fed has a two-pronged mandate — low inflation as well as full employment — and requested that “the decisions you make at the next FOMC meeting reflect your commitment to the dual mandate.”
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The last time the Fed raised interest rates, from 2016 to December 2018, Powell faced withering criticism from former President Donald Trump, who on one occasion called the central bankers “boneheads” and seemed to compare Powell unfavorably with Chinese President Xi Jinping when he asked in a tweet, “Who is our bigger enemy?”
Democrats, including then-presidential hopeful Joe Biden, criticized Trump for his Fed comments, insisting the central bank be free of political pressure when formulating monetary policy.
Brown’s stance was considerably more nuanced than Trump’s — though equally unlikely to move the dial on monetary policy.
“Chair Powell has made it pretty clear that the necessary conditions for the Fed to achieve its full employment objective is low and stable inflation. Without low and stable inflation, there’s no way to achieve full employment,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics. “He’ll stick to his guns on this. I don’t see this as having any material impact on decision making at the Fed.”
To be sure, while it’s most likely a reaction to a changing tone from some Fed officials and a slight shift in the economic data, market expectations for monetary policy have altered a bit.
Traders have made peace with the three-quarter point hike next week. But they now see just a 36% chance for another such move at December’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting, after earlier rating it a near 80% probability, according to CME Group data.
That change in sentiment has come following cautionary remarks about overly aggressive policies from several Fed officials, including Vice Chairman Lael Brainard and San Francisco regional President Mary Daly. In remarks late last week, Daly said she’s looking for a “step-down” point where the Fed can slow the pace of its rate moves.
“The democratization of the Fed is the issue for the market, how much power the other members have versus the chairman. It’s difficult to know,” said Quincy Krosby, chief equity strategist at LPL Financial. Regarding Brown’s letter, Krosby said, “I don’t think it’s going to affect him. … It’s not the pressure coming from the politicians, which is to be expected.”
A Fed spokesman acknowledged that Powell received the Brown letter and said normal policy is to respond to such communication directly. In the past, Powell has been generally dismissive when asked if political pressure can factor into decision making.
Along with the nudging from Brown, Powell also has faced criticism from others on Capitol Hill.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the ultra-progressive Massachusetts Democrat and former presidential contender, has called Powell dangerous and recently also warned about the impact rate hikes could have on employment. Also, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., last year criticized Powell for what was seen as the Fed’s flat-footed response to the early rise of inflation.
“I don’t necessarily think that Powell will buckle to the political pressure, but I’m wondering whether some of his colleagues start to, some of the doves who have become hawkish,” said Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at Bleakley Advisory Group. “Employment’s fine now, but as months go on and growth continues to slow and layoffs begin to increase at a more notable pace, I have to believe that the level of pressure is going to grow.”
Payroll gains have been strong all years, but a number of companies have said they are either putting a freeze on hiring or cutting back as economic conditions soften. A slowing economy and stubbornly high inflation is making the backdrop difficult for the November elections, where Democrats are expected to lose control of the House and possibly the Senate.
With the high stakes in mind, both markets and lawmakers will be listening closely to Powell’s post-meeting news conference next Wednesday, which will come six days before the election.
“He knows the pressure. He knows that the politicians are increasingly nervous about losing their seats,” Krosby said. “There’s very little he could do at this point, by the way, to help either party.”
LONDON — It took one bruising campaign defeat and six weeks of exile — but on Tuesday, Rishi Sunak will finally become U.K. prime minister.
He faces the toughest in-tray of any British leader since World War II, entering No. 10 Downing Street as the country hurtles into winter with energy bills, hospital waiting lists, borrowing costs and inflation all soaring.
The challenge has been magnified by Liz Truss’ brief crash-and-burn premiership. As a result of her now-infamous mini-budget, which was scrapped almost in its entirety after causing chaos in financial markets, the Conservatives are trailing the opposition Labour Party by over 30 percentage points in opinion polls.
On Monday, Sunak told MPs he was ready to hit the ground running as he addressed them for the first time since becoming Tory leader. Over the days and months ahead, he will need to carry out his first ministerial reshuffle without further fracturing his party; oversee the first budget since the last one wreaked havoc on the economy; and determine what support to offer voters with their energy bills past this spring.
Prime ministers tend to think of their first 100 days as a way to set the tone for their premierships. For Sunak, who has just over two years to govern before he is required to face a general election, that first impression is going to be particularly important.
October 25 — Meeting with the king and first speech outside No. 10 Downing Street
Sunak will become the prime minister Tuesday after an audience with King Charles III, where he will ask the monarch for permission to form a government.
Sunak will then address the country for the first time as prime minister from the steps outside No. 10 Downing Street at around 11.35 a.m.
To much of the British public, the former chancellor is a familiar face who announced the wildly-popular furlough scheme during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
His task now will be to reassure people that the government will support them during another difficult economic period — only this time he is in a much tougher position. The popularity he gained during the pandemic has waned, and he is taking over after a major government crisis — the third Tory prime minister to hold office within three months.
October 25 — First reshuffle
The first big political test for Sunak will be his Cabinet reshuffle. Tory MPs believe he will learn the lesson from Truss’ first and only one, where she divvied up roles between her allies and left almost everyone who didn’t back her out in the cold.
“I think his reshuffle will be more unifying, bringing in people from all wings and will not be as destabilizing as Liz’s,” an MP who did not back Sunak predicted.
Sunak’s leadership rival Penny Mordaunt is expected to be handed a major Cabinet position | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Sunak is likely to make at least his major Cabinet appointments Tuesday afternoon, so they are in place to line up alongside him on the House of Commons’ front bench when MPs grill him during so-called prime minister’s questions (PMQs) on Wednesday.
His biggest decision will be whether to keep Jeremy Hunt — who was drafted in by Truss in a last-ditch effort to save her premiership — as chancellor. He is also likely to hand a big job to his leadership rival Penny Mordaunt.
Close Sunak allies who are likely to get promotions include Mel Stride, the current chairman of the Treasury select committee, Craig Williams, Claire Coutinho and Laura Trott. Tory big beast Michael Gove could see a return to Cabinet.
October 26 — First PMQs
Sunak will go head-to-head as prime minister with Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, for the first time on Wednesday.
Unlike his predecessor, Sunak won’t have much to worry about from his own side — Tory MPs have largely rowed behind him since he became their leader on Monday, with many expressing relief that the perpetual state of crisis of the Truss government has ended.
But MPs will want him to demonstrate that he can land blows against Starmer at a time when Labour is streets ahead in the polls. Sunak told Tory MPs on Tuesday that their party faced an “existential threat” as a result of its low poll ratings.
October 28 — Deadline to form a government in Belfast
If a power-sharing arrangement is not in place at Stormont by Friday, a fresh set of elections to the Northern Irish assembly will have to be triggered.
Calling these elections — the second set in seven months — could be one of the Sunak government’s first acts and an indication of successive Tory prime ministers’ failure to deal with the political crisis in Northern Ireland.
The Democratic Unionist Party issued a fresh warning on Monday night that it would not participate in the assembly unless Sunak takes action on the post-Brexit Northern Ireland protocol agreed with the EU.
October 31 — First budget
The next budget was penciled in for October 31 by Kwasi Kwarteng, the Truss-era chancellor who wanted to use it to reassure financial markets still reeling from his last one.
The timing of the budget — widely derided by Tory MPs because of the optics of holding it on Halloween — was intended to give the Bank of England time to react before its own key meeting on November 3, where it will set interest rate levels for the weeks ahead.
In its biggest test so far, Sunak’s government will have to decide whether to stick with that date; what actions to take to reassure the markets; and how to fill the enormous hole in the U.K. public finances.
Carl Emmerson, deputy director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said: “If his chancellor is Jeremy Hunt and Sunak is comfortable with the way things are proceeding for next Monday, then going ahead has lots of advantages.
“You get the announcement out before the Bank of England makes its next inflation figure, and you get the Office for Budgetary Responsibility forecasts out there, which helps show the markets you are serious about them.
“The case for changing that date is much stronger if Sunak says, ‘Actually, I want to do something different to what Jeremy Hunt has been planning, and I need more time,’” Emmerson added.
November 3 — Bank of England rates meeting
The Bank of England’s monetary policy committee is expected to raise interest rates at its meeting on November 3, triggering a fresh hike in people’s mortgages.
This is the point when many people will realize for the first time that they will have to make much larger mortgage repayments once their current fixed-rate deals come to an end.
Sunak made combating inflation and keeping mortgages low a central theme of his leadership campaign over the summer. Reacting to the rates decision and ensuring the government works closely with the Bank of England to combat inflation will be a key test of his premiership.
November 6 — COP27 summit in Egypt
Sunak made a point of telling Tory MPs on Tuesday that he is committed to the U.K.’s goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The question now is whether he attends the COP27 climate summit in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Truss reportedly planned to go, despite her skepticism of aspects of the net-zero agenda.
If Sunak does go to Egypt, it could be his first foreign trip in office (unless he decides to make a quick visit to Ukraine beforehand) and his first opportunity to present himself on the world stage.
November 8 — Boundary changes
The Boundary Commission for England will publish its new constituency map on November 8.
At this point, some Tory MPs will know with near certainty that their constituencies are being carved up between neighboring areas, with some forced to jostle with colleagues over who will get to stand where.
It will be a political headache for Sunak to deal with, and any MPs whose safe seats become marginal will sense their political careers coming to an end — and will have less of an incentive to support him in key votes in the months ahead.
November 13 — G20 meeting in Indonesia
The next big foreign trip coming down the track is the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia.
The meeting will be an opportunity for Western powers to present a united front against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine and against China’s increased aggression toward Taiwan, but also to hold talks behind closed doors. There have been reports that both China’s Xi Jinping and Russian Vladimir Putin will attend.
Sophia Gaston, the head of foreign policy at the Policy Exchange think tank, said this was shaping up to be “one of the most extraordinary summits of modern history, with a violent war raging in Ukraine and the leading protagonist, Vladimir Putin, on the guest list alongside other autocratic leaders and outraged democratic allies.”
“As well as promoting free trade and the rules-based international order, Sunak would likely see the G20 as an opportunity to build support for his proposed ‘NATO-style’ technology alliance,” Gaston said. “He may well also debut a new U.K. message on the net-zero transition.”
Late November or early December — Chester by-election
Labour whips are preparing to trigger a by-election in the city of Chester in late November or December.
The by-election is taking place because the city’s MP Christian Matheson resigned after a parliamentary watchdog recommended he be suspended for sexual misconduct.
Matheson sits on a 6,164-vote majority, and the seat has traditionally been a swing seat flipping between the Tories and Labour. It was Conservative up until 2010.
Based on current polling figures, Labour should win a significantly larger majority than it currently has, though by-elections do suffer from small turnouts and so unexpected results are not uncommon. A dramatic Tory defeat would set alarm bells ringing in the party.
Another by-election could be triggered in the coming months if, as expected, Boris Johnson elevates his ally and MP Nadine Dorries to the House of Lords in his resignation honors. That would likely be the first by-election in a Tory-held seat fought with Sunak as party leader.
December 31 — U.K. deadline for joining trans-Pacific trade bloc
The U.K. government has said it hopes to conclude negotiations on joining the CPTPP — a trade agreement signed by 11 countries including Australia and New Zealand — by the end of the year.
Securing this deal was one of Truss’ priorities. For Sunak it would represent both a concrete foreign policy achievement and an indication that the U.K. is successfully building closer diplomatic ties with countries in the Indo-Pacific after Brexit.
Talks around the partnership have thrown up some diplomatic obstacles, with China reacting angrily to U.K. trade officials meeting Taiwanese counterparts. Both China and Taiwan have applied to join the CPTPP.
There have been suggestions that the evidence against him is so damning that Johnson could face temporary suspension from parliament or even be kicked out as an MP. The inquiry may have formed part of Johnson’s decision not to stand for the Tory leadership contest.
If the privileges committee says Johnson should be sanctioned once it concludes its inquiry, Sunak will have to judge his response and decide whether to whip Tory MPs to back its recommendations even if that provokes Johnson’s ire. There is also the risk that Sunak himself will be dragged into the probe, given he too was fined over the Partygate scandal.
Among other things, the probe will examine the impact of the economic policies that Sunak designed as chancellor during the pandemic, putting his decisions under scrutiny.
His “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme — which encouraged people to dine in restaurants during the post-lockdown summer of 2020 — could become a focus, with critics claiming it drove up coronavirus-related infections and deaths.
February — Energy support nears its end
By the time Sunak’s first 100 days are up, there will be pressure on the government to explain how it will support people with their energy bills past the spring if wholesale gas prices haven’t drastically fallen. Hunt has already rolled back the Truss government’s two-year guarantee and instead capped people’s energy bills at an average of £2,500 for just six months. That policy ends in April.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Emmerson said: “We’ve got a big generous offer from the government through this winter — although prices are still a lot higher than they were last year, they will be nowhere near as high as they would have otherwise been.
“The prime minister and chancellor will spend a lot of time thinking about how they replace that scheme. In some ways, it’s very similar to the kind of furlough scheme that Sunak had during the pandemic — very generous, big scheme with lots of crude edges to it,” he said.
“It’s understandable wanting to get in place quickly to support people, but how do you get out of it? Do it too quickly and that’s too much pain for too many people — keep it in place for too long, and that’s very expensive to the government.”
It’s just one of so many enormous decisions the new PM faces in his first 100 days.
This is an opinion editorial by Mickey Koss, a West Point graduate with a degree in economics. He spent four years in the infantry before transitioning to the Finance Corps.
I love listening to Greg Foss on podcasts, especially when I’m gearing up for a heavy dead lift or something like that. His no-nonsense talks about bonds just really gets my blood flowing and my mind focused. But when I send stuff like that to my less finance-minded buddies, they often have trouble understanding what he’s talking about.
Here’s my attempt at some potentially oversimplified math to explain the debt spiral.
As of October 13, 2022, the United States has $31,144,952,729,330.20 worth of outstanding debt. This is updated daily by the Treasury. To make the math a little more simple, let’s just call it $30 trillion. After all, what’s another trillion, give or take?
This implies a $621 billion annual interest payment on the debt this year. The Washington Post estimates $580 billion. Let’s split the difference and call it $600 billion.
If you’ve been paying attention, the Federal Reserve is aggressively raising interest rates and the market is equally aggressive in bidding up yield on government debt.. Every basis point that is added to the average rate on U.S. government debt will add about $3 billion in additional interest expense. That’s if the debt stays at its current level.
That unfortunately is not going to happen. Currently, the annual budget shortfall sits at $946 billion per year with no signs of ever going to zero. Since this is the case, not only will the U.S. government have to issue more debt at a rate of nearly $1 trillion more per year, it will be doing so while interest rates are going up fast.
The higher interest rates go, the more interest on the debt will be required to be paid. The more interest on the debt required to be paid, the larger the deficit gets. The larger the deficit gets, the more debt must be issued. More debt issued, more interest on debt. Even if the Fed dropped rates back to zero, the debt would continue to grow at a compounding rate because of the nature of the deficit.
Even more concerning is the above graph depicting the debt as a percentage of gross domestic product. The upward slope of the line since the mid-1980s implies that the debt has been growing faster than the economy for decades.
The nature of the perpetual budget deficit ensures that this situation is an inevitability; the Fed is just accelerating it at the moment. Debt begets more debt as long as the deficit exists.
Hopefully you get it now. This is what Greg Foss means by a debt spiral. The debt never actually gets paid off; it just keeps getting rolled over, growing at a compounding rate. On this trajectory, it will start to accelerate.
Bitcoin Is Protection
Based on math alone, the Federal Reserve cannot continue to raise rates for much longer, nor keep them this high because the interest on the debt will become completely unmanable. There is a lot to be said about a Fed Pivot and when they will decide to taper their taper to lower interest rates back down. When will they actually do it? I’m not sure, but the Fed will have to eventually drop rates back down to try and slow the bleeding. And when it does, the rally that the bitcoin price will have is going to melt your face off.
While I am not particularly interested in the price anymore — unlike some — I am concerned with everyday people being able to hop on the bitcoin life raft before it shoots off into space.
Absolute scarcity is an absolute imperative in a world bereft of monetary scarcity. Be a good friend: help people grasp this concept, because most don’t understand what’s coming.
This is a guest post by Mickey Koss. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
Some investors are on edge that the Federal Reserve may be overtightening monetary policy in its bid to tame hot inflation, as markets look ahead to a reading this coming week from the Fed’s preferred gauge of the cost of living in the U.S.
“Fed officials have been scrambling to scare investors almost every day recently in speeches declaring that they will continue to raise the federal funds rate,” the central bank’s benchmark interest rate, “until inflation breaks,” said Yardeni Research in a note Friday. The note suggests they went “trick-or-treating” before Halloween as they’ve now entered their “blackout period” ending the day after the conclusion of their November 1-2 policy meeting.
“The mounting fear is that something else will break along the way, like the entire U.S. Treasury bond market,” Yardeni said.
Treasury yields have recently soared as the Fed lifts its benchmark interest rate, pressuring the stock market. On Friday, their rapid ascent paused, as investors digested reports suggesting the Fed may debate slightly slowing aggressive rate hikes late this year.
Stocks jumped sharply Friday while the market weighed what was seen as a potential start of a shift in Fed policy, even as the central bank appeared set to continue a path of large rate increases this year to curb soaring inflation.
The stock market’s reaction to The Wall Street Journal’s report that the central bank appears set to raise the fed funds rate by three-quarters of a percentage point next month – and that Fed officials may debate whether to hike by a half percentage point in December — seemed overly enthusiastic to Anthony Saglimbene, chief market strategist at Ameriprise Financial.
“It’s wishful thinking” that the Fed is heading toward a pause in rate hikes, as they’ll probably leave future rate hikes “on the table,” he said in a phone interview.
“I think they painted themselves into a corner when they left interest rates at zero all last year” while buying bonds under so-called quantitative easing, said Saglimbene. As long as high inflation remains sticky, the Fed will probably keep raising rates while recognizing those hikes operate with a lag — and could do “more damage than they want to” in trying to cool the economy.
“Something in the economy may break in the process,” he said. “That’s the risk that we find ourselves in.”
‘Debacle’
Higher interest rates mean it costs more for companies and consumers to borrow, slowing economic growth amid heightened fears the U.S. faces a potential recession next year, according to Saglimbene. Unemployment may rise as a result of the Fed’s aggressive rate hikes, he said, while “dislocations in currency and bond markets” could emerge.
U.S. investors have seen such financial-market cracks abroad.
The Bank of England recently made a surprise intervention in the U.K. bond market after yields on its government debt spiked and the British pound sank amid concerns over a tax cut plan that surfaced as Britain’s central bank was tightening monetary policy to curb high inflation. Prime minister Liz Truss stepped down in the wake of the chaos, just weeks after taking the top job, saying she would leave as soon as the Conservative party holds a contest to replace her.
“The experiment’s over, if you will,” said JJ Kinahan, chief executive officer of IG Group North America, the parent of online brokerage tastyworks, in a phone interview. “So now we’re going to get a different leader,” he said. “Normally, you wouldn’t be happy about that, but since the day she came, her policies have been pretty poorly received.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury market is “fragile” and “vulnerable to shock,” strategists at Bank of America warned in a BofA Global Research report dated Oct. 20. They expressed concern that the Treasury market “may be one shock away from market functioning challenges,” pointing to deteriorated liquidity amid weak demand and “elevated investor risk aversion.”
“The fear is that a debacle like the recent one in the U.K. bond market could happen in the U.S.,” Yardeni said, in its note Friday.
“While anything seems possible these days, especially scary scenarios, we would like to point out that even as the Fed is withdrawing liquidity” by raising the fed funds rate and continuing quantitative tightening, the U.S. is a safe haven amid challenging times globally, the firm said. In other words, the notion that “there is no alternative country” in which to invest other than the U.S., may provide liquidity to the domestic bond market, according to its note.
YARDENI RESEARCH NOTE DATED OCT. 21, 2022
“I just don’t think this economy works” if the yield on the 10-year Treasury TMUBMUSD10Y, 4.228%
note starts to approach anywhere close to 5%, said Rhys Williams, chief strategist at Spouting Rock Asset Management, by phone.
Ten-year Treasury yields dipped slightly more than one basis point to 4.212% on Friday, after climbing Thursday to their highest rate since June 17, 2008 based on 3 p.m. Eastern time levels, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Williams said he worries that rising financing rates in the housing and auto markets will pinch consumers, leading to slower sales in those markets.
“The market has more or less priced in a mild recession,” said Williams. If the Fed were to keep tightening, “without paying any attention to what’s going on in the real world” while being “maniacally focused on unemployment rates,” there’d be “a very big recession,” he said.
Investors are anticipating that the Fed’s path of unusually large rate hikes this year will eventually lead to a softer labor market, dampening demand in the economy under its effort to curb soaring inflation. But the labor market has so far remained strong, with an historically low unemployment rate of 3.5%.
George Catrambone, head of Americas trading at DWS Group, said in a phone interview that he’s “fairly worried” about the Fed potentially overtightening monetary policy, or raising rates too much too fast.
The central bank “has told us that they are data dependent,” he said, but expressed concerns it’s relying on data that’s “backward-looking by at least a month,” he said.
The unemployment rate, for example, is a lagging economic indicator. The shelter component of the consumer-price index, a measure of U.S. inflation, is “sticky, but also particularly lagging,” said Catrambone.
At the end of this upcoming week, investors will get a reading from the personal-consumption-expenditures-price index, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, for September. The so-called PCE data will be released before the U.S. stock market opens on Oct. 28.
Meanwhile, corporate earnings results, which have started being reported for the third quarter, are also “backward-looking,” said Catrambone. And the U.S. dollar, which has soared as the Fed raises rates, is creating “headwinds” for U.S. companies with multinational businesses.
“Because of the lag that the Fed is operating under, you’re not going to know until it’s too late that you’ve gone too far,” said Catrambone. “This is what happens when you’re moving with such speed but also such size, he said, referencing the central bank’s string of large rate hikes in 2022.
“It’s a lot easier to tiptoe around when you’re raising rates at 25 basis points at a time,” said Catrambone.
‘Tightrope’
In the U.S., the Fed is on a “tightrope” as it risks over tightening monetary policy, according to IG’s Kinahan. “We haven’t seen the full effect of what the Fed has done,” he said.
While the labor market appears strong for now, the Fed is tightening into a slowing economy. For example, existing home sales have fallen as mortgage rates climb, while the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing survey, a barometer of American factories, fell to a 28-month low of 50.9% in September.
Also, trouble in financial markets may show up unexpectedly as a ripple effect of the Fed’s monetary tightening, warned Spouting Rock’s Williams. “Anytime the Fed raises rates this quickly, that’s when the water goes out and you find out who’s got the bathing suit” — or not, he said.
“You just don’t know who is overlevered,” he said, raising concern over the potential for illiquidity blowups. “You only know that when you get that margin call.”
U.S. stocks ended sharply higher Friday, with the S&P 500 SPX, +2.37%,
Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +2.47%
and Nasdaq Composite each scoring their biggest weekly percentage gains since June, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Still, U.S. equities are in a bear market.
“We’ve been advising our advisors and clients to remain cautious through the rest of this year,” leaning on quality assets while staying focused on the U.S. and considering defensive areas such as healthcare that can help mitigate risk, said Ameriprise’s Saglimbene. “I think volatility is going to be high.”
Europe, the world’s largest economic bloc, enjoyed stable trade surpluses for a decade but the war in Ukraine and the ensuing energy crisis have tipped the Continent into a spiraling external deficit unseen since the launch of the euro.
The terms-of-trade shock maxed out in August, the latest month for which trade figures are available. And, even though energy prices have since eased, European leaders are still scrambling to shore up supplies of affordable oil and gas to replace lost Russian deliveries. A harsh winter looms.
A breakdown of the trade figures shows that the EU’s manufacturing trade surplus has nearly halved this year.
Can Europe bounce back? Or will its industrial base become hollowed out as industry moves offshore? And will the eurozone, and the EU more broadly, end up being saddled with the chronic external deficits that have long plagued the United States and, more recently, destabilized Britain? POLITICO breaks it down for you:
What’s going on?
The eurozone’s negative trade balance with the rest of the world in August stood at €50.9 billion, the highest deficit ever recorded, compared to a €2.8 billion surplus a year ago, according to the latest Eurostat numbers.
The trade deficit for the EU as a whole spiraled to €64.7 billion.
The eurozone’s current account balance — the balance of all trade in goods and services as well as international transfers of capital, such as remittances — hit a €26.32 billion deficit in August, largely driven by the trade deficit in goods, the European Central Bank reported.
Is that a bad thing?
A trade deficit occurs when a country or trading bloc’s imports exceed its exports. A trade surplus is the opposite. Trade deficits are not per se good or bad, although many countries seek a trade surplus, including by setting up tariffs and quotas to artificially boost their trade balance, a practice known as mercantilism.
Is it temporary?
The trade deficit is largely driven by high energy prices, which in August hit a record €350 per megawatt hour. Prices have come down from their peak, trading at around €150/MWh, but they are still a multiple of where they were a year ago.
“Markets have gone from pricing this energy crisis as being temporary, they are now pricing it to be a much longer-term story, albeit not as elevated as it was in August,” said Kristoffer Kjær Lomholt, chief FX analyst at Danske Bank.
“We think that it is a kind of a more long-term thing that is going to weigh on the currencies of economies that are energy importers, where the eurozone, of course, stands out to a very large extent,” he added.
Others believe that the shift, being largely energy related, could resolve itself over time, said Sam Lowe, who covers trade policy at Flint Global.
An EU official also pointed to EU-Russia trade. “The peak in energy prices has made the value of our imports from Russia increase substantially (while the volume of those imports from Russia decreased), and our exports have spiralled down because of sanctions (export controls),” the official said.
Will the EU be less competitive if energy prices remain high?
A negative trade balance and consequently a weaker currency makes imports more expensive. “Net importers will have to pay more for goods and services,” said Lomholt.
On the other hand, a weaker euro could fuel exports, said Matthias Krämer, head of external economic policy at German industry federation BDI. “If the euro currency was a little bit weaker, it could also make Europe’s position on global markets better by making exports cheaper,” he said.
But there’s another way of looking at this. Lowe argued the sustained large eurozone trade surplus was itself problematic, in that it was a function of intra-EU demand being lower than it should be. “Being overly dependent on external demand also leaves the EU quite vulnerable to both external shocks, and political coercion.”
What does that mean for the euro?
“We expect the euro to decline further in coming months as part of this adjustment,” said Robin Brooks, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance.
A negative trade balance or current account deficit puts downward pressure on the value of free-floating currencies, which move with demand of goods: less demand for a country’s exports means less demand for its currency, which in turn lowers its value relative to others. Conversely, strong foreign demand for goods strengthens a country’s currency.
“Foreign investors need to be compensated via a real depreciation of the exchange rate, and generally higher real interest rates,” said Lomholt at Danske Bank.
The Danish lender has recently downgraded its forecast for the € to $ exchange rate to $0.93 in 12 months from virtual parity now, driven in part by the energy price shock. “We have for some time been arguing that €/$ looked overvalued and not undervalued … And just given the additional push to the energy crisis that we got during summer, we saw a case that the euro/dollar [exchange rate] should actually hit even lower,” he said.
Is business freaking out?
A bit.
“The data are not so surprising considering the high energy prices, but they are worrying”, said Luisa Santos, responsible for international relations at BusinessEurope. She called on the EU to try to bring energy prices down and to boost exports by opening new market opportunities via more trade agreements.
Germany, the bloc’s export powerhouse, increased its exports by 14 percent in the first eight months of the year but imports have surged by more than 27 percent, according to national trade figures.
“We’re not performing in a segment which is highly influenced by a cost driven competition,” said Krämer at the German industry federation. “But if this situation will last longer of course some parts of our industry will be more and more under pressure.”
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Philadelphia Federal Reserve President Patrick Harker on Thursday said higher interest rates have done little to keep inflation in check, so more increases will be needed.
“We are going to keep raising rates for a while,” the central bank official said in remarks for a speech in New Jersey. “Given our frankly disappointing lack of progress on curtailing inflation, I expect we will be well above 4% by the end of the year.”
The latter comment was in reference to the fed funds rate, which currently is targeted in a range between 3%-3.25%.
Markets widely expect the Fed to approve a fourth consecutive 0.75 percentage point interest rate hike in early November, followed by another in December. The expectation is that the Federal Open Market Committee, of which Harker is a nonvoting member this year, will then take rates a bit higher in 2023 before settling in a range around 4.5%-4.75%.
Harker indicated that those higher rates are likely to stay in place for an extended period.
“Sometime next year, we are going to stop hiking rates. At that point, I think we should hold at a restrictive rate for a while to let monetary policy do its work,” he said. “It will take a while for the higher cost of capital to work its way through the economy. After that, if we have to, we can tighten further, based on the data.”
Inflation is currently running around its highest level in more than 40 years.
According to the Fed’s preferred gauge, headline personal consumption expenditures inflation is running at a 6.2% annual rate, while the core, excluding food and energy prices, is at 4.9%, both well above the central bank’s 2% target.
“Inflation will come down, but it will take some time to get to our target,” Harker said.
A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.
London CNN Business
—
Twelve days from now, the Federal Reserve will meet again, and expectations for the central bank’s next moves are firming up. The consensus among investors: Persistently hot inflation means the Fed will need to continue with its string of aggressive interest rate hikes, which is unprecedented in the modern era.
What’s happening: Markets see a 99% probability that rates will rise by another three-quarters of a percentage point, reaching a range of 3.75% to 4%.
A hike of that magnitude is now “a given,” Quincy Krosby, chief global strategist for LPL Financial, told clients on Wednesday. “Concern is now focused on December, and whether the Fed is prepared to transition to smaller rate hikes.”
That’s up from a 60% probability one month ago. So what changed?
Inflation, mainly. The US Consumer Price Index rose 8.2% in the year to September after rising 8.3% annually in August. While CPI peaked at 9.1% in June, that reading was still uncomfortably elevated and higher than economists had expected.
The 6.6% annual uptick in shelter costs was of particular concern. It takes longer for housing expenses to come back down than some other categories, since renters tend to sign leases for 12-month periods. The monthly rise in core services costs (excluding energy) was the largest gain in three decades.
The data underscored the need for the Federal Reserve to stay tough — while a strong jobs report for September will deliver confidence the central bank can do so without causing undue harm to the US economy.
Fed officials have said as much. In an interview with Reuters on Friday, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said inflation had become “pernicious,” which means that “frontloading” larger rate hikes is logical.
The market impact: The S&P 500 kicked off the week with a 3.8% rally before dropping 0.7% on Wednesday. It’s still plodding along in a bear market, about 23% below its January peak. So long as the Fed signals its intention to keep the pressure on, boosting the odds of a US recession, volatility is expected to persist.
Even relatively solid corporate earnings may not be sufficient to change the direction.
“So far, the results are decent, but they’re being compared to consensus estimates that have been persistently lowered since early summer,” noted strategists at Charles Schwab.
Tesla
(TSLA) posted a solid quarter of earnings and record revenue, but now says it will likely fall short of its target for a 50% growth in the number of cars it sells this year.
Quick rewind: As recently as July, the company said it was still aiming for a target of 50% growth from the 936,000 cars it delivered in 2021.
But with two quarters of disappointing deliveries caused by supply chain issues and Covid-related shutdowns in China, that goal has looked increasingly out of reach, my CNN Business colleague Chris Isidore reports.
CEO Elon Musk said that the electric carmaker is not struggling with demand.
“We expect to sell every car that we make, for as far in the future as we can see,” he said on a call with analysts on Wednesday.
Instead, the company said it would “just” miss its target due to complications with delivery of cars from its factories to customers at the end of the year.
Shares are down 5% in premarket trading on Thursday. They’ve dropped 37% year-to-date, compared to a 22.5% fall in the S&P 500.
“This quarter was not roses and rainbows,” said Dan Ives, tech analyst for Wedbush Securities. “Competition is increasing. There are some logistical challenges.”
America’s business leaders are becoming more pessimistic. The Conference Board recently reported a slide in its CEO confidence index, which it said had hit levels not seen “since the depths of the Great Recession.”
Of the 136 CEOs who were surveyed, 98% said they were preparing for a US recession over the next 12 to 18 months — and 99% said they were bracing for a recession in Europe.
Notably, the business community is not being quiet about its concerns.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos tweeted Tuesday that “the probabilities in this economy tell you to batten down the hatches.”
He was responding to a clip of an interview with Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, who told CNBC that “it’s a time to be cautious.”
“You have to expect that there’s more volatility on the horizon now,” Solomon said. “That doesn’t mean for sure that we have a really difficult economic scenario. But on the distribution of outcomes, there’s a good chance that we have a recession in the United States.”
American Airlines
(AAL), AT&T
(T), Dow, Nucor
(NUE) and Quest Diagnostics
(DGX) report results before US markets open. CSX
(CSX), Snap
(SNAP) and Whirlpool
(WHR) follow after the close.
Also today:
Initial US jobless claims for last week post at 8:30 a.m. ET.
Existing home sales for September follow at 10 a.m. ET.
Coming tomorrow: Earnings from American Express and Verizon.
A customer looking at the price of limes at a fruit stand in Sydney. According to Australia’s Bureau of Statistics, Australia’s inflation rate rose to 6.1 in June, a 21-year high.
Lisa Maree Williams | Getty Images News
The Bank of Queensland said it’s“quite bullish” on Australia’s “very robust economy” — but not everyone agrees.
“We’ve got a very robust economy, which I think when you look at the global challenges, the likelihood of us actually coming out of this in good shape is quite high,” George Frazis, CEO of Bank of Queensland, told CNBC on Wednesday.
“The [Reserve Bank of Australia] has moved fairly quickly to deal with inflation … that’s why I think there’s a good chance that we’ll have a soft landing in Australia,” Frazis said.
“As is the case in most countries, inflation in Australia is too high,” the Australian central bank said. “Global factors explain much of this high inflation, but strong domestic demand relative to the ability of the economy to meet that demand is also playing a role.”
Frazis cited “very high household savings” and “very low unemployment” as driving forces for the robust economy, despite pressure on housing prices.
“And this is on the backdrop where housing prices have actually increased by 39% over the last two years,” clarifying later that the figure referred to price increases in Australia between June 2019 to April this year.
Figures from Corelogic, one of Australia’s leading property data providers, indicate that national Australian housing values increased by 28.6% in the past two years. Some capital cities experienced price rises of 39% and more.
While the housing sector is highly vulnerable to higher interest rates, actual housing construction should remain solid for a while…
Shane Oliver
chief economist, AMP Capital
The linchpin of whether the housing market gets disrupted or not, according to Frazis, lies with the unemployment numbers, which he said were at an “all-time low.”
“Our view is that [unemployment] is likely to continue and that is the key driver of housing getting disrupted or not.”
The bank’s CEO also expressed confidence that Australia is “well buttressed” against any kind of cataclysmic event within the housing market, citing homeowners were saving up and being ahead on repayments.
However, he maintained that disruption in the Australian housing market is “unlikely” to materialize.
However, not everyone carries the same optimism as Frazis.
According to a financial stability review on RBA, Australia’s higher interest rates will increase borrowers’ debt repayments.
The report pointed out that income growth has not kept up with inflation in Australia and households are left with less capacity to service their debt. Additionally, a small share of borrowers with high debt and low savings are “vulnerable” to payment difficulties.
“Debt-servicing challenges will become more widespread if economic conditions, particularly the level of unemployment, turn out to be worse than expected and housing prices fall sharply,” the report continued.
In addition, Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones cautioned that Australia’s economy is not “hermetically sealed” from the forecasted downturn of the international economy, Sky news reported.
Jones added that the country’s major trading partners are in a “precarious” and deteriorating” situation, which is going to impact Australia.
He also noted that as inflation rises, the economy slows around the world. This will in turn have an impact on Australia’s growth forecast.
“We just cannot be complacent about those numbers,” he said.
One economist suggested a modest outlook for Australia’s economy, and predicted the country’s growth will slow to around 2%, as opposed to falling into recession.
High household debt in Australia could could hurt consumer spending, according to Shane Oliver, chief economist at AMP Capital. However, inflation and lower wage growth also meant that this risk is lower, he added.
Australian dollar banknotes of various denominations are arranged for a photograph in Sydney, Australia, on Friday, Aug. 4, 2017. High household debt in Australia could risk compromising consumer spending, according to Shane Oliver, chief economist at AMP Capital. However, inflation and lower wage growth also meant that this risk is lower, he added.
Brendon Thorne | Bloomberg | Getty Images
“While the housing sector is highly vulnerable to higher interest rates, actual housing construction should remain solid for a while thanks to a big pipeline of approved but yet to be completed home building projects,” said Oliver.
The economist added that Australia’s gas prices have not shot up anywhere near as much as that in Europe, and the falling Australian dollar will provide a buffer against global weakness.
LONDON — Jeremy Hunt, the man brought in to save Liz Truss’ floundering premiership and calm spooked markets, is “not taking anything off the table” when it comes to rethinking the government’s economic policies.
In a round of broadcast interviews Sunday, Hunt — appointed as the U.K.’s top finance minister Friday after Truss sacked Kwasi Kwarteng — left the door open to fresh about-turns on the debt-funded, tax-cutting promises that helped Truss become Conservative leader just weeks ago.
“We are going to have to take some very difficult decisions, both on spending and on tax,” Hunt told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. “Spending is not going to increase by as much as people hoped, and indeed we’re going to have to ask all government departments to find more efficiencies than they had planned, and taxes are not going to go down as quickly as people thought, and some taxes are going go up,” he added.
Hunt — a former Cabinet minister and two-time leadership contender drawn from the center-left of the Conservative Party — is now in an extraordinarily powerful position, having been drafted in to salvage Truss’ premiership amid collapsing poll ratings and economic turmoil.
Conservative MPs have been openly criticizing her leadership, amid fevered speculation in Westminster that the party will try to oust her — a move that would likely require a change to the party’s internal rules and could put the U.K. on its third prime minister this year.
As well as sacking her chancellor, Truss was on Friday forced to abandon a totemic pledge from her leadership campaign, and she will now increase corporation tax as had originally been planned by the man she defeated in the Tory contest, Rishi Sunak. It followed a humiliating climbdown over plans to cut taxes for Britain’s top earners, unveiled in a so-called mini-budget in September that was not subject to the usual scrutiny by Britain’s independent fiscal watchdog and prompted an emergency intervention from the Bank of England and a sharp rise in mortgage rates.
Hunt went armed to his BBC interview with a message to voters and nervous MPs. “One thing I want to reassure families who are worried at home is that our priority, the lens through which we’re going to do this is as a compassionate Conservative government, and top of our mind when we’re making these decisions will be struggling families, struggling businesses, the most vulnerable people and we will be doing everything we can to protect them,” he said.
Pressed on the scope of his revised tax-and-spend plans ahead of a fiscal announcement slated for October 31, Hunt told the BBC: “I’m not taking anything off the table.”
But he warned Conservative MPs against trying to oust Truss, saying a further leadership contest was “the last thing that people really want.”
Elsewhere on Sunday, Tory MPs expressed their anger at the Truss administration. Senior backbencher and education committee chairman Robert Halfon said he was not calling for Truss to go “at this time,” but demanded a “dramatic reset” of her premiership.
The government, he told Sky News, had looked like “libertarian jihadists” who had treated the country like “laboratory mice.” Crispin Blunt, a former minister, became the first to publicly call on Truss to step aside, telling telling Channel 4 News: “U think the game’s up, and it’s now a question as to how the succession is managed.”
Amid efforts by some government ministers to paint the U.K.’s economic woes as entirely global, former Bank of England Deputy Governor Charlie Bean told Sky’s Sophy Ridge show: “Frankly, I think it’s disingenuous to say it’s all a global phenomenon; it’s not.”
On interest rate rises now facing the U.K., Bean argued that around two-thirds is down to global factors, with the rest a U.K.-specific phenomenon that’s developed since the mini-budget. “Basically we’ve moved from looking not too dissimilar from the U.S. or Germany as a proposition to lend to, to looking more like Italy and Greece,” he said.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The S&P 500 is down nearly 20% year-to-date, the dollar has lost lots of buying power, and the fed has made it increasingly difficult for young buyers to purchase their first home.
With all these factors at play, it is essential to listen to economic experts like Jerome Powell. Powell spoke on interest rates again in early September. The Fed is expected to continue raising interest rates until the inflation numbers are under control. “Restoring price stability will take some time and requires using our tools forcefully to bring supply and demand into better balance,” Mr. Powell said in those remarks. “While higher interest rates, slower growth and softer labor market conditions will bring down inflation, they will also bring some pain to households and businesses.”
The whipsaw action wasn’t limited to stocks, and was described by Rick Rieder, the chief investment officer for global fixed income at BlackRock, as “one of the craziest days” of his career.
The bond market’s warning
Some investors who focus on stocks might not realize that the bond market is much larger, and that its movements can cause government and central-bank policies to shift. Larry McDonald, founder of The Bear Traps Report and author of “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense,” which described the 2008 failure of Lehman Brothers, explained just how bad the action was in the U.K. bond market over the past few weeks, when 30-year government bonds issued in December traded as low as 24 cents on the dollar. He also predicted what will happen if the Federal Reserve continues on its current course of interest-rate increases.
Michael Brush argues the Federal Reserve is moving too quickly to raise interest rates and cool the U.S. economy. He expects a rapid decline in inflation and a new bull market for stocks. In a column, he shares five sentiment indicators that suggest it is time to buy stocks — especially this group of companies.
Time for a refreshing COLA if you are on Social Security
Getty Images
The Social Security Administration has announced that its cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for 2023 will be 8.7%, the largest increase in four decades. There is more to the story, including tax implications and changes to Medicare, as Jessica Hall and Alessandra Malito explain.
Freddie Mac said interest rates on 30-year mortgage loans averaged 6.92% on Oct. 13, up from 3.05% a year earlier. Mortgage Daily said rates had hit 7.10% — the highest in 20 years — and economists are warning these levels could be a “new normal.”
A homeowner locked-in with a low interest rate on their mortgage loan will be reluctant to sell. And some would-be buyers may now be priced out of the market because of much higher loan payments. Here’s what economists expect for home prices in 2023.
This is why Florida’s insurance market is such a mess
Florida insurers are not only suffering from storm-damage payouts.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Hurricanes are nothing new to Floridians, but insurers in the state are losing money even though premiums have doubled over the past five years. Shahid S. Hamid, the director of the Laboratory for Insurance at Florida International University, explains why the Florida insurance market is so distorted.
Here’s a travel option you may never have heard of — home swapping
Villefranche-sur-mer on the French Riviera.
istock
Home swapping can give you an opportunity to live as a local in a faraway place while spending much less than you would as a tourist. Here’s how it works.
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As Britain’s central bank boss, tasked with managing inflation and setting interest rates, Andrew Bailey likes targets. Now he is one.
Markets are dumping U.K. assets amid chaotic policymaking from Liz Truss’ new government — but Bailey’s rocky stewardship of the Bank of England is getting a growing share of the blame. His harshest critics include some of Truss’ most senior Conservative Party colleagues.
At stake are home loans for 2 million households coming due for renewal amid cripplingly high interest rates in the next two years and the viability of pension funds managing more than £1 trillion worth of assets. Failure to quell a “fire sale” of U.K. bonds and currency risks a financial meltdown that could spread far beyond British shores.
The current bond market pressure began after U.K. Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng announced a vast package of unfunded tax cuts, stoking investors’ fears about the long-term sustainability of the government’s debt.
The dramatic selloff of government bonds sparked a panic at U.K. pension funds, which couldn’t handle the price falls, and has huge knock-on impacts for mortgage rates and borrowing costs.
The political fallout has so far landed on Truss’ government’s shoulders — prompting U-turns on key policies as opinion polls showed cratering support.
Yet before the U.K.’s self-inflicted turmoil, Bailey was feeling political pressure over the central bank’s handling of double-digit inflation and the rising cost of living that comes with it.
While No. 10 refuses to be drawn on the Bank’s decisions, Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg suggested a failure to raise interest rates quickly was at the root of the turmoil in financial markets.
He dismissed it as “commentary” to draw a direct link between the government’s mini-budget and concerns over the U.K.’s financial stability that led to emergency intervention from the Bank, adding that pension funds’ “high-risk” activities had played a role.
“It could just as easily be the fact that the day before, the Bank of England did not raise interest rates by as much as the Federal Reserve did,” he told the BBC’s Today program.
In another apparent swipe at the Bank, Rees-Mogg added: “The pound and other currencies have been falling against the dollar because interest rates in the U.S. have been rising faster than they have in other markets.”
In the immediate aftermath of Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-budget, the Bank seemed to be in command of the situation when it stepped in to calm the pension fund crisis and refused to be pushed into an early interest rate rise by markets. But two further interventions this week and confusion over stark comments from Bailey himself risk undermining that impression.
The governor on Tuesday issued a rare ultimatum to beleaguered pension funds struggling to meet cash calls in the government bond market. “You’ve got three days left now. You’ve got to get this done,” he warned at an event in Washington.
The bank has effectively bailed out pension funds since the U.K. government’s mini-budget roiled the markets. The bond-buying intervention is intended to offer temporary relief and give the affected funds time to raise enough cash to handle historic surges in yields.
Bailey’s message appeared to be aimed at upping the pressure on funds to sell assets in time rather than expecting an extension beyond Friday’s deadline. “We will be out by the end of this week,” he said.
Yet the remarks seemed to backfire instantly, sparking a sharp fall in the pound, although it has since recovered.
U.K. government borrowing costs also increased again on Wednesday, with the yield on 30-year gilts moving above 5 percent — the level that first sparked the bank’s intervention — before dropping back after the Bank used its firepower to buy £4.4 billion of gilts.
Financial market experts think the governor’s comments were a mistake that will force the bank into following the government’s recent U-turns.
Mike Howell of CrossBorder Capital described Bailey’s words as the “shortest suicide note in history,” and said the governor will have to change course.
“Andrew Bailey’s insistence that emergency support will end on Friday is an unsustainable position that we expect to be reversed quickly,” said Oxford Economics chief economist Innes McFee.
If the Bank loses credibility, its ability to rescue the economy from market disruption will be severely hampered. Increasingly costly interventions will yield ever more limited results if investors lose faith in the U.K.’s most important financial institution.
Before Bailey’s comments on Tuesday, one markets strategist said the Bank could “test the water” by stopping the program on Friday and then restarting if necessary — but that would be risky because it’s unclear how much yields would have to rise before triggering the same problems at pension funds.
“While a very able central banker, he has spent most of his career outside the BoE’s monetary policy and markets areas,” said EFG Bank chief economist Stefan Gerlach, previously a central banker himself.
“He is not the best fit for the job, given the nature of the problems the Bank is facing now. His communications missteps over the last year were damaging,” he said, pointing to Bailey’s confusing guidance on interest rates. “It’s like the fire brigade saying ‘you have to have your fire before Friday because then we are heading home.’”
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Calling inflation “unacceptably high,” Federal Reserve leaders saw their strategy of fighting price pressures aggressively as less risky to the economy than doing too little, minutes of the bank’s last meeting show.
The Fed approved another jumbo-size increase in U.S. interest rates at its Sept. 21-22 meeting. It also signaled plans for another pair of big increases before year-end in a surprise to Wall Street DJIA, -0.10%.
The minutes of the Fed’s meeting underscore that top officials were disappointed and worried about persistently high inflation.
“A sizable portion of the economic activity has yet to display much response,” the Fed minutes said. “Inflation had not yet responded appreciably to a policy tightening.”
While some senior Fed officials also worried the bank could go too far and damage the economy, the majority appeared to believe it was vital for the central bank to squelch inflation, even if that meant keeping rates high for a prolonged period.
“Many participants emphasized that the cost of taking too little action to bring down inflation likely outweighed the cost of taking too much action,” the minutes said.
The Fed predicts the economy will eventually slow as rates rise, but it noted the labor market remains extremely tight.
Fed officials also expressed concern that oil prices could rise again, supply chains would not heal as quickly as expected and that rising wages could exacerbate inflation.
“Inflation was declining more slowly than [Fed officials] had been anticipating,” the minutes said.
The internal Fed debate has also playing out publicly since the last meeting.
Some senior officials such as Atlanta Federal Reserve President Raphael Bostic hope the bank will make enough progress in its fight against inflation to “pause” rate hikes at the end of this year.
Fed critics contend the bank is going to go too far and could plunge the economy into a second recession in four years. A pause would allow the Fed to see how much its prior rate hikes have succeeded in lowering the rate of inflation, they say.
Failing to do so, they contend, would make it even harder to get prices back under control if Americans come to view high inflation as the norm. That would do even more damage to the economy in the long run.
Jennifer Lee, senior economist at BMO Capital Market, downplayed the debate and said the Fed in unified on its next few steps.
“The Federal Reserve is pretty much in sync and is not going to be easing anytime soon,” she said.
Since March the Fed has lifted a key short-term interest rate from near zero to an upper end of 3.25%. And the central bank has telegraphed plans to raise the so-called fed funds rate to as high as 4.75% by next year.
Rising U.S. interest rates has done little so far to douse inflation.
The rate of inflation, using the Fed’s preferred PCE price index, rose at a yearly rate of 6.2% as of August. That’s a long way off from the Fed’s forecast for inflation to fall to 2.8% in 2023 and 2.3% by 2024.
The higher cost of borrowing has only chilled a few parts of the economy, most notably housing.
The rate on a 30-year mortgage has surged above 7% to a 16-year high from less than 3% one year ago. The result has been a slowdown in home buying and construction and softer sales of home furnishings.
Most consumer and business loans are influenced by the fed funds rate.
Jerome Powell and other members of the Federal Reserve are obsessed with choking off inflation once and for all, even if the Fed’s series of aggressive rate hikes slow the economy to a crawl. That could be bad news for consumers, investors and Corporate America.
What’s more, many market experts and economists note that the rate of inflation, while still uncomfortably high, is falling and should continue to decline – but there is a noted lag effect. Fed vice chair Lael Brainard admitted as much in a speech Monday, saying that “policy actions to date will have their full effect on activity in coming quarters.”
Still, the Fed isn’t done raising rates. Investors are pricing in the strong probability of a fourth consecutive three-quarters of a percentage point hike at the Fed’s next meeting on November 2. And the chances of a fifth straight hike of that magnitude at the Fed’s December 14 meeting are also on the rise.
It seems that Powell wants to atone for his mistake of repeatedly calling inflation “transitory” for much of last year. So the Fed is going to keep raising rates to prove that it is taking inflation seriously, even if that leads to a bigger pullback in stocks…and tipping the economy into a recession.
Needless to say, that’s a problem. Especially since the Fed has two mandates: price stability and maximum employment. That means the jobs market might get hit due to the Fed’s laser-like focus on inflation.
“My concern is that the Fed is tightening so quickly and so significantly without knowing what it means for the economy,” said Brian Levitt, global market strategist with Invesco.
Keep in mind that the Fed’s series of rate hikes are unprecedented in the “modern” era of central banking, i.e. after Alan Greenspan became Fed chair in 1987 and the Fed became far more transparent.
The Fed was far more opaque before Greenspan, and the market didn’t pick apart every speech, policy move and economic forecast the way Wall Street does now. Inflation in the 1970s and early 1980s was also a much different animal, due largely to an oil price shock that lasted years because of a supply shortage.
The current inflation crisis stems from more temporary (we won’t say transitory) supply chain issues tied to the pandemic as well as the rapid reopening of the global economy following a brief recession.
“We’re more cautious because the Fed is tightening into a weakening economy,” said Keith Lerner, co-chief investment officer and chief market strategist with Truist Advisory Services. “These supersized hikes are the most aggressive in decades. But the Fed has scar tissue from inflation.”
Unless pricing pressures pick up again, it appears the year-over-year increase for the consumer price index (CPI) peaked at 9% in June. That’s a big move from about 2.3% in February 2020 just before the pandemic shutdown. But 9% is still a far cry from the CPI high during the Volcker years of 14.6% in early 1980.
And with consumer and wholesale prices already edging lower, some experts worry that the continued uber-hawkish stance by the Fed will do more harm than good for the economy.
“The speed at which the Fed is increasing rates will certainly have some unintended consequences,” said Michael Weisz, president of Yieldstreet, an investment firm that specializes in so-called alternative assets such as real estate, private equity, venture capital and art.
Weisz said the surge in interest rates could lead to a “consumer credit crunch being more pronounced,” in which loans beyond mortgages might become more expensive and harder to get.
Rate hikes raise the costs for companies to pay down their debt, increasing the possibility of corporate bankruptcies and defaults on commercial loans. It may even potentially lead to stagflation…the double whopper of stagnant growth and continued inflation. In other words, prices may remain high and the job market will probably be worse.
“The Fed runs a real risk of over-tightening, as the impacts of the restrictive policy may not flow through inflation and unemployment data until it’s too late,” Weisz added.
As long as inflation remains the bigger issue for the economy, the Fed is going to focus more on getting prices under control. After all, the unemployment rate is at 3.5%, a half-century low.
“The Fed has made it clear their number one priority right now is price stability,” said Dustin Thackeray, chief investment officer of Crewe Advisors. “Until the Fed sees sustained evidence their monetary policy is having a material impact on…the job market, they will maintain their persistent efforts in reining in inflationary pressures.”
Wholesale prices rose more than expected in September despite Federal Reserve efforts to control inflation, according to a report Wednesday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The producer price index, a measure of prices that U.S. businesses get for the goods and services they produce, increased 0.4% for the month, compared with the Dow Jones estimate for a 0.2% gain. On a 12-month basis, PPI rose 8.5%, which was a slight deceleration from the 8.7% in August.
Excluding food, energy and trade services, the index increased 0.4% for the month and 5.6% from a year ago, the latter matching the August increase.
Inflation has been the economy’s biggest issue over the past year as the cost of living is running near its highest level in more than 40 years.
The Fed has responded by raising rates five times this year for a total of 3 percentage points and is widely expected to implement a fourth consecutive 0.75 percentage point increase when it meets again in three weeks.
A worker installs the instrument cluster for the Ford Motor Co. battery powered F-150 Lightning trucks under production at their Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Michigan on September 20, 2022.
Jeff Kowalsky | AFP | Getty Images
However, Wednesday’s data shows the Fed still has work to do. Indeed, Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester on Tuesday said “there has been no progress on inflation.” Following the PPI release, traders priced in an 81.3% chance of a three-quarter point hike, the same as a day ago.
Stock market futures trimmed gains following the news, while Treasury yields were little changed on the session.
The PPI release comes a day ahead of the more closely watched consumer price index. The two measures differ in that PPI measures the prices received at the wholesale level while CPI gauges the prices that consumers pay.
Some two-thirds of the increase in PPI was attributed to a 0.4% gain in services, the BLS said. A big contributor to that increase was a 6.4% jump in prices received for traveler accommodation services.
Final demand goods prices also rose 0.4% on the month, pushed by a 15.7% advance in the index for fresh and dry vegetables.
US President Joe Biden arrives to speak at the Volvo Group powertrain manufacturing facility in Hagerstown, Maryland, on Friday, Oct. 7, 2022.
Craig Hudson | Bloomberg | Getty Images
President Joe Biden said he doesn’t believe there will be a recession in the near future and if there is, he expects it to be a “slight” economic dip.
“Every six months they say this. Every six months, they look down the next six months and say what’s going to happen,” Biden said in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN that was aired Tuesday, referring to recent economic projections by major U.S. banks.
“It hadn’t happened yet. It hadn’t… I don’t think there will be a recession. If it is, it’ll be a very slight recession. That is, we’ll move down slightly.”
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon on Monday warned of the likelihood of a recession in six to nine months.
The concerns come as the Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates aggressively in an effort to reduce inflation. In September, the U.S. central bank raised benchmark interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point — it was the Fed’s third consecutive hike.
Biden didn’t fully discount the odds of a recession but told CNN the odds were low.
The president acknowledged the U.S. has “real problems” but credited legislation passed under his administration like the Inflation Reduction Act with putting the United States in “a better position than any other major country in the world economically and politically.”
South Korea’s central bank went for a second outsized rate increase in three months in response to the aggressive U.S. monetary policy tightening and high inflation at home.
The Bank of Korea raised its benchmark seven-day repurchase rate by 50 basis points to 3.00% on Wednesday. The bank’s latest move followed its quarter-percentage-point rate rise in August after its first-ever half-percentage-point increase in July.
Twenty-two of 25 analysts surveyed by The Wall Street Journal had expected the bank to resume the outsized rate increase, citing its pressing need to respond to the Fed’s faster-than-expected pace of rate increases and still high inflation at home.
Korean policy makers have been concerned about the won’s steep decline against the greenback, as the Fed lifted federal funds rates by 75 bps at each of its past three meetings and could make another big such rate increase in November. The weaker won could risk a flight of foreign capital from the country.
South Korea’s headline inflation softened for a second consecutive month to 5.6% in September but remained well above the BOK’s 2% annual target.
BOK officials expect inflation to remain above 5% in the near term.
LONDON — Try as she might, Liz Truss just can’t calm the markets.
Despite reversing her plan to cut tax for the highest earners, bringing forward a more detailed budget statement by almost a month and halting the appointment of a controversial senior civil servant to oversee the Treasury, the Bank of England was again forced to step in to try to stabilize market turbulence.
Insiders pointed to the surprise appointment of James Bowler to the Treasury top job, passing over Antonia Romeo, who it was widely briefed had got the role, as a sign of No. 10’s anxiety.
“The PM is panicking and reaching for almost anything that she can do to calm the situation. She was so burnt by the fallout from mini-budget that anything that seemed bold, she now wants to massively trim back,” said a senior Whitehall official.
Treasury officials say that Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s tone in the past week has become markedly more conciliatory as he tries to steady the buffs.
But in spite of these U-turns, the current market unease may be out of the government’s hands.
The so-called mini budget came at a particularly fragile time for the economy, caused by high inflation and the Bank of England’s attempts to end a policy that saw it buy up huge quantities of government debt, originally an attempt to stabilize the economy in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
Kwarteng’s tax cuts, presented without any detail about how they would be funded, spooked the markets, triggering a crisis at U.K. pension funds because the huge spike in yields forced them to bonds — but that then forced prices down further.
The Bank of England intervened with a £65 billion check book to give pension funds more time to raise cash and stop the so-called doom loop taking hold. Governor Andrew Bailey said Tuesday the Bank’s emergency support will definitely end Friday, prompting fears this may not be enough time.
The resulting crisis leaves Britain’s new prime minister with an intensifying political problem, as support ebbs away the longer it takes to tame the markets.
Jill Rutter, senior fellow at the Institute for Government and former Treasury official, said: “Paradoxically, having said they were the people to take on the Treasury orthodoxy, they are now walking on such thin ice that they are complete prisoners of the most orthodox orthodoxy.”
Staying alive
The race is now on for Kwarteng and his Treasury team to come up with a way to restore credibility by the end of October, when he is due to explain how the tax cuts will be paid for.
“It’s really difficult to see how you can have a vaguely deliverable plan to bring that back under control,” said the IfG’s Rutter, who pointed out that trying to find money from one-off events such as asset sales would not help the underlying fiscal position.
“If you’ve still got a pension fund problem with collateral issues, what [the government] give you on the 31st will probably not be that relevant, because you’ll still be dealing with a bigger problem,” said one markets strategist, speaking of condition of anonymity.
“If you as a government have somewhat stabilized [pension funds] … the currency is going to react based on how [the market] views the overall fiscal long-term sustainability.”
But the government’s dented reputation will be hard to rebuild. “If the root cause is fiscal policy, then the issue probably isn’t going to go away until the markets’ concerns over fiscal policy have eased,” said Paul Dales, chief UK economist at Capital Economics.
“That makes the chancellor’s medium-term fiscal plan on 31 October a very big event for the gilt market, the pound and the Bank of England. Our feeling is that the chancellor will have to work very hard indeed to convince the markets that his fiscal plans are sustainable.”
Ministers originally said their plan for £43 billion in tax cuts would be funded by borrowing and economic growth, but experts now warn it will require reductions in public spending.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank predicted the chancellor would need to spend £60 billion less by 2026-2027, while the International Monetary Fund released a report calculating that high prices will last longer in the U.K. than many other major economies..
Ahead of the mini-budget, the Resolution Foundation’s Torsten Bell spelled out why this could have a lasting effect. “The big picture in a world where interest rates are rising and inflation is high, is that you don’t want to be seen as the one country that everyone decides is a bad bet.”
“Showing how serious you are is important,” he added. “If we are really arguing that our growth strategy is to borrow lots more and then that will pay for itself then they [the markets] don’t believe that.”
One government official speculated that in order to fill the hole in public finances and make the numbers add up Truss and Kwarteng would be forced to U-turn on further aspects of their mini-budget, such as the decision to cancel a planned corporation tax rise.
In the meantime, it’s not just the markets that remain unconvinced by Truss’ and Kwarteng’s approach.
At the chancellor’s debut session of Treasury questions in the Commons Tuesday, senior Tory MPs queued up to openly cast aspersion on his strategy.
Former Cabinet minister Julian Smith asked for reassurance that tax cuts “will not be balanced on the backs of the poorest people in the country” — normally an attack line reserved for opposition MPs.
Treasury committee Chairman Mel Stride warned that if Kwarteng did not seek buy-in from fellow MPs on the next fiscal statement it would upset the markets again.
The PM’s spokesman reiterated Tuesday that Truss is “committed to the growth measures set out by the chancellor” and “the fundamentals of the U.K. economy remain strong.”
While that statement continues to be tested, so will the position of the prime minister and her chancellor.
Annabelle Dickson contributed reporting.
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Don’t assume the worst is over, says investor Larry McDonald.
There’s talk of a policy pivot by the Federal Reserve as interest rates rise quickly and stocks keep falling. Both may continue.
McDonald, founder of The Bear Traps Report and author of “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense,” which described the 2008 failure of Lehman Brothers, expects more turmoil in the bond market, in part, because “there is $50 trillion more in world debt today than there was in 2018.” And that will hurt equities.
The bond market dwarfs the stock market — both have fallen this year, although the rise in interest rates has been worse for bond investors because of the inverse relationship between rates (yields) and bond prices.
About 600 institutional investors from 23 countries participate in chats on the Bear Traps site. During an interview, McDonald said the consensus among these money managers is “things are breaking,” and that the Federal Reserve will have to make a policy change fairly soon.
Pointing to the bond-market turmoil in the U.K., McDonald said government bonds that mature in 2061 were trading at 97 cents to the dollar in December, 58 cents in August and as low as 24 cents over recent weeks.
When asked if institutional investors could simply hold on to those bonds to avoid booking losses, he said that because of margin calls on derivative contracts, some institutional investors were forced to sell and take massive losses.
And investors haven’t yet seen the financial statements reflecting those losses — they happened too recently. Write-downs of bond valuations and the booking of losses on some of those will hurt bottom-line results for banks and other institutional money managers.
Interest rates aren’t high, historically
Now, in case you think interest rates have already gone through the roof, check out this chart, showing yields for 10-year U.S. Treasury notes TMUBMUSD10Y, 3.898%
over the past 30 years:
The yield on 10-year Treasury notes has risen considerably as the Federal Reserve has tightened during 2022, but it is at an average level if you look back 30 years.
FactSet
The 10-year yield is right in line with its 30-year average. Now look at the movement of forward price-to-earnings ratios for S&P 500 SPX, -0.03%
since March 31, 2000, which is as far back as FactSet can go for this metric:
FactSet
The index’s weighted forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 15.4 is way down from its level two years ago. However, it is not very low when compared to the average of 16.3 since March 2000 or to the 2008 crisis-bottom valuation of 8.8.
Then again, rates don’t have to be high to hurt
McDonald said that interest rates didn’t need to get anywhere near as high as they were in 1994 or 1995 — as you can see in the first chart — to cause havoc, because “today there is a lot of low-coupon paper in the world.”
“So when yields go up, there is a lot more destruction” than in previous central-bank tightening cycles, he said.
It may seem the worst of the damage has been done, but bond yields can still move higher.
Heading into the next Consumer Price Index report on Oct. 13, strategists at Goldman Sachs warned clients not to expect a change in Federal Reserve policy, which has included three consecutive 0.75% increases in the federal funds rate to its current target range of 3.00% to 3.25%.
The Federal Open Market Committee has also been pushing long-term interest rates higher through reductions in its portfolio of U.S. Treasury securities. After reducing these holdings by $30 billion a month in June, July and August, the Federal Reserve began reducing them by $60 billion a month in September. And after reducing its holdings of federal agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $17.5 billion a month for three months, the Fed began reducing these holdings by $35 billion a month in September.
Bond-market analysts at BCA Research led by Ryan Swift wrote in a client note on Oct. 11 that they continued to expect the Fed not to pause its tightening cycle until the first or second quarter of 2023. They also expect the default rate on high-yield (or junk) bonds to increase to 5% from the current rate of 1.5%. The next FOMC meeting will be held Nov. 1-2, with a policy announcement on Nov. 2.
McDonald said that if the Federal Reserve raises the federal funds rate by another 100 basis points and continues its balance-sheet reductions at current levels, “they will crash the market.”
A pivot may not prevent pain
McDonald expects the Federal Reserve to become concerned enough about the market’s reaction to its monetary tightening to “back away over the next three weeks,” announce a smaller federal funds rate increase of 0.50% in November “and then stop.”
He also said that there will be less pressure on the Fed following the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 8.
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—
The Nobel in economics is sort of the step-cousin of the Nobel family.
It came about nearly 70 years after its literature and sciences counterparts, in 1969, and is technically called the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences.” It is awarded by the Swedish central bank, in honor of the namesake renaissance man Alfred Nobel who established the prizes.
Some scholars really dislike the economics prize, including one of Nobel’s own descendants, who dismissed it as a “PR coup by economists.”
But hey, it still comes with a cash prize. And it’s also pretty useful in reminding the world that economics as an academic field is, frankly, a barely understood hodge-podge of studies that is constantly evolving and so variable it’s almost useless outside of academia. (And I mean that with the utmost respect to economists, who, not unlike journalists, knew what they were doing when they chose their life of suffering.)
Here’s the thing: Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman who guided the US economy through the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession, was awarded the Nobel in economics along with two other economists, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig. (Congrats to all the winners, with apologies to Doug and Phil, who will forever be referred to in headlines about the Nobel as “and two other economists.”)
Bernanke, who previously taught at Princeton and earned his Ph.D from MIT, received the award for his research on the Great Depression. In short, his work demonstrates that banks’ failures are often a cause, not merely a consequence, of financial crises.
That was groundbreaking when he published it in 1983. Today, it’s conventional wisdom.
WHY IT MATTERS
The timing is everything here. The Nobel committee has been known to play politics (see: that time Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize after being in office for just eight months). And right now, it is using its spotlight to call attention to the high-stakes gamble playing out at central banks around the world, most notably the Fed.
The rapid run-up in interest rates, led by the US central bank, is causing markets around the world to go haywire. And it’s especially bad news for emerging economies.
Monetary tightening — especially when it is aggressive and synchronized across major economies — could inflict worse damage globally than the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic, a United Nations agency warned earlier this month. It called the Fed’s policy “imprudent gamble” with the lives of those less fortunate.
LESSONS FROM HISTORY
On Monday, Diamond, one of the three newly minted Nobel laureates, acknowledged that the rate moves around the world were causing market instability.
But he believes the system is more resilient than it used to be because of hard lessons learned from the 2008 crash, my colleague Julia Horowitz reports.
“Recent memories of that crisis and improvements in regulatory policies around the world have left the system much, much less vulnerable,” Diamond said.
Let’s hope he’s right.
Oh hey, speaking of the Fed inflicting pain: We’re about to see big job losses, according to Bank of America.
Under the rate hikes imposed by Jay Powell & Co, the US economy could see job growth cut in half during the fourth quarter of this year. Early next year, the bank expects to see losses of about 175,000 jobs a month.
The litigation between Elon Musk and Twitter is officially on hold. The two sides now have until October 28 to work out a deal or once again gear up for a courtroom battle.
The big question now is all about the money.
Here’s the deal: Not even the world’s richest person has this kind of cash just lying around. Musk’s wealth is tied up in Tesla stock, which he can’t easily offload for a whole bunch of reasons. He needs to borrow the money, which means he’s got to get banks to pony up.
By most accounts, he’ll be able to make it happen. But the Twitter deal is a harder pitch to make now than it was back in April, when Musk said he’d lined up more than $46 billion in financing, including two debt commitment letters from Morgan Stanley and other unnamed financial institutions, my colleague Clare Duffy writes.
Musk has spent the past several months trashing Twitter as he sought to renege on his offer. Meanwhile, tech stocks have been hammered, ad revenues are declining, and the global economy has inched closer to a recession, sapping investor appetite for risk.
Musk’s legal team said last week the banks that had committed debt financing previously were “working cooperatively to fund the close.”
Twitter is, understandably, skeptical, given the many curve balls Musk has thrown at them since he got involved with the company earlier this year. The company raised concerns last week that a representative for one of the banks testified that Musk had not yet sent a borrowing notice and “has not otherwise communicated to them that he intends to close the transaction, let alone on any particular timeline.”
What’s Musk’s endgame?
No one knows, perhaps least of all Musk. But many legal experts following the case say Musk understood he’d likely lose at trial and then be forced to buy Twitter anyway. He’d rather buy the entire company than be deposed by Twitter’s lawyers and do further damage to Twitter in a trial.
And the banks may not be able to walk away even if they want to.
“The only way they could get out of it is to claim a material adverse effect and that Twitter has changed so much since they agreed to the deal that they no longer want to finance the deal,” said George Geis, professor of strategy at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
Even if the banks succeeded there, Musk may not be off the hook. The judge in the case could rule that Musk was at fault for the financing falling through — not a far-fetched notion after all the trash-talking — and order him to sue Morgan Stanley to provide the funds or close the deal without it.
Bottom line, it seems like Musk will end up owning Twitter one way or another. And given his only vague musings about what he’d actually do with it, there are a whole host of unknowns lurking in Twitter’s future.
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