Fed will overshoot rate increases

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If you want an idea of how the current fiscal and asset bubble in the US might end, pay close attention to Bernard Connolly, esteemed consigliere to hedge funds and central bankers across the world for the last quarter century.

It will not end in a soft landing – a “chimaera” – and will certainly not end in another leg of accelerating economic growth. Nor will it end in soggy stagflation.

The invidious choice facing the Federal Reserve, he warns, is either to allow a deep economic slump to unfold, or slash rates to the bone before inflation has fallen back to target. The latter course will send the dollar into free fall and destabilise the world’s dollarised financial system, an outcome already being sniffed out by the reawakening gold market.
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“There can be little doubt that there will be a US recession unless the Fed loosens hard and soon. The labour market is weakening and ‘excess savings’ from the pandemic-era handouts are exhausted,” he said.

“The likeliest near-term outcome is that, as in 2000 and 2007, the Fed holds off cutting interest rates just yet, citing worries that inflation is not convincingly and sustainably moving to target. By mid-year the weakening of the economy will have become evident even to the Fed’s modellers. But they will not cut far enough or fast enough,” he said.
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This points to an initial rate cut in June, followed by cascading cuts in rapid succession, though still too little, too late. The Fed Board is already preparing for a hand-brake U-turn. Governor Adriana Kugler recently reminded everybody that the Fed has a “dual mandate”: jobs as well as inflation.

Days earlier, New York Fed chief John Williams said the supply-side shock of the pandemic had blown over and that US inflation had carved out a near perfect round trip, “like the Apollo missions to the moon and back.” He said three-year inflation expectations are now below their 2014-2019 average. This is a Fed preparing its alibi.

As I wrote last week, the US economy has lost a net 900,000 workers since November, based on the US household survey. This has lifted unemployment from 3.4pc to 3.9pc. The jump is close to triggering the Fed’s ‘Sahm Rule’ recession indicator.

The US economy is not as strong as widely assumed. The latest US financial accounts show that gross domestic income (GDI) grew by just 1.2pc last year. This measure has been consistently weaker over recent quarters than the GDP figure, which ought to give pause for thought.

A Fed study found that GDI is more accurate when the economy rolls over. It foretold a recession in 2007 at a time when the GDP figures (revised down later) were still signalling clear blue sky.
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The Wicksellian theme running through Mr Connolly’s book is that central banks have created a chronic ‘intertemporal’ misalignment in the western economies, starting with Alan Greenspan in the 1990s.

They have let asset booms run unchecked but have always stepped in to prevent the economy coming back into balance during downturns. But you cannot pull consumption from the future forever without consequences. The future catches up with you.

“The real difficulty with the Greenspan maxim – that a problem deferred is a problem solved – is that you have to keep on deferring, via ever-bigger bubbles that ultimately threaten to destroy both capitalism and democracy,” he said. Furthermore, this reflex obstructs the Schumpeterian cleansing process of creative destruction.

As Joe Biden’s budget boom deflates this year it will become clear that the US economy cannot handle interest rates anywhere near the current level of 5.33pc. America and the West will discover that they are on the same conveyor-belt towards “ever-lower real interest rates”, requiring drastic cuts to refloat the next bubble in equities and credit.

My angle is slightly different. Deflation will keep coming back to haunt us with each cycle – requiring zero rates and crazy money – because of ageing demographics, digital technology, and above all the Asian saving glut.

The cardinal fact is that China produces 31pc of global manufactured goods but accounts for 13pc of total consumption. Xi Jinping’s regime is dumping massive excess capacity on the rest of us. It is reverting to the worst practices of Leninist capitalism. This is the elephant in the global rowing boat.

Whether Mr Connolly is right or savings glut theorists are right, both imply a secular collapse in the natural rate of interest and the subversion of western free market system.

The central banks and the academic priesthood are floundering because their canonical DSGE model – new neoclassical synthesis – assumes that the economy comes back into equilibrium when it patently does no such thing. The model is self-evidently defective but all other voices – Wicksellian, monetarist, Austrian, or old Keynesian – have been shut out of the debate.

The priests were badly wrong in 2007-2008. We will find out who is badly wrong this year soon enough.

 

Fed holds rates steady but indicates three cuts coming sometime this year​

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday held interest rates steady as expected but signaled that it still plans multiple cuts before the end of the year.

Following its two-day policy meeting, the central bank’s rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee said it will keep its benchmark overnight borrowing rate in a range between 5.25%-5.5%, where it has held since July 2023.

Along with the decision, Fed officials penciled in three quarter-percentage point cuts by the end of 2024, which would be the first reductions since the early days of the Covid pandemic in March 2020.

More:

 
JPow press conference starting now:

 
If the economy is doing so well, as he asserts that it is, why is there any talk/expectations of lowering rates? If the economy is so great, it stands to reason that the economy can bear the current interest rate.

In my lifetime, I cannot recall them lowering rates during good economic times. That only seemed to happen when economic trouble becomes apparent. So why now?
 
Because they're lying, nonstop.

Truth and Government, are two words that never go together; but neither have we endured such a constant, nonstop barrage of transparent, intelligence-insulting LIES.

Not until now.
 
Because they're lying, nonstop.
Well yea, so why can't everyone see that? Anyone old enough to give a fuck about the fed and their interest rate, is old enough to realize that what I posted is objectively true.


Truth and Government, are two words that never go together; but neither have we endured such a constant, nonstop barrage of transparent, intelligence-insulting LIES.

Not until now.
We actually have. You've simply come to be able to see it for what it is. Plenty of dirty dealings and lies have been going on for longer than either of us have been alive.
.....but it has gotten more visible, especially over the past 8 years thanks to the turmoil caused by the dems insane reaction to Trump beating their hag. A lot of eyes have been opened that would have remained blissfully closed had the wretched hag somehow pulled out a victory.
On a side note, could ya even imagine how fucked things would be had that happened? I shudder to even think about it. At the least, we'd have a SC with four new Justices like this last abomination instead of just one. There's been several favorable rulings thanks to the new Court that, had the hag won, would have all gone hard the other way.



It's alao gotten harder to conceal contain and control what gets out, and the image presented for public consumption. Never used to have so many "citizen journalists" with a Twitter account standing ready to go viral.
 
They can cut rates to bail out refis of commercial real estate and restrict funding for other applicants with creative qualifications. I smell a rat.
 

The great central bank policy reversal kicks off​

  • Swiss kick off rate cuts among major central banks
  • ECB likely to follow in June
  • BoE, Fed to come next before the summer is over
  • Inflation is on downward trend but not yet extinguished
FRANKFURT/WASHINGTON, March 22 (Reuters) - The world's biggest central banks are on the starting line of reversing a record string of interest rate hikes but the way down for borrowing costs will look very different from the way up.

There will be no floodgates or fireworks. Instead, banks on opposite sides of the Atlantic are likely to move in the smallest increments with periodic pauses, fearing that ultra-low unemployment could rekindle inflation rates still above their targets.

The eventual bottom for interest rates is also set to be far higher than the historic lows of the last decade and mega-shifts in the structure of the global economy could put borrowing costs on a higher path for years to come.

Central banks started to jack up rates from late 2021 as post-pandemic supply constraints and surging energy prices on Russia's war in Ukraine sent inflation into double-digit territory across much of the world.

More:

 
Stubbornly high inflation could push the Federal Reserve into a more cautious stance this year regarding interest rate cuts, the central bank's former vice chair said Friday.

Richard Clarida, who served as Fed governor until January 2022 and is now a global economic advisor at asset management giant Pimco, said his former colleagues need to be on guard against sticky prices that could thwart plans to ease monetary policy this year.

At its meeting earlier this week, the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee indicated it would likely decrease rates three times this year, assuming quarter percentage point intervals. Chair Jerome Powell said receding inflation and a strong economy give policymakers room to cut.

"This may be more of a hope than a forecast," Clarida said during an interview on CNBC's "Squawk Box." "I do hope that the Fed really moves into data-dependent mode, because there can be a very good case if inflation is sticky and stubborn that they shouldn't deliver three cuts this year."
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From post #242:
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As I wrote last week, the US economy has lost a net 900,000 workers since November, based on the US household survey. This has lifted unemployment from 3.4pc to 3.9pc. The jump is close to triggering the Fed’s ‘Sahm Rule’ recession indicator.
...

Related:
Closely followed measures of U.S. inflation have come in hotter than expected so far this year, and economist Claudia Sahm is getting nervous: A recent batch of economic reports implies that pricing pressures aren’t abating steadily, which could give the Federal Reserve an excuse for what she views as “foot-dragging” on cutting the interest rates that have made mortgages, car loans and credit-card balances more expensive.

“I would really have them take 25 basis points off next week,” Sahm said in mid-March, after the release of the February consumer-price index.

In a series of conversations with MarketWatch over the past month, Sahm said she wants the Fed to ease rates — which are currently in the range of 5.25% to 5.5% — ASAP. She’s not advocating for a dramatic cut but says the Fed needs to get the ball rolling on easing the tight monetary policy it has implemented over the past two years to help cool the economy and quash out-of-control inflation.

Given everything she’s heard from policy makers in recent weeks, Sahm suspects that the first cut might not come until July. The delay raises the risk that the Fed will cut interest rates too late and cause a recession, she said, by leaving a too-restrictive policy in place for too long. ...

More:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/oth...-here-s-why-she-s-getting-worried/ar-BB1kzQ16
 
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