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Fed Policy

Oct 06 2023

Has The Tsunami Of Stimulus Been Worth It?

  • Oct 6, 2023

Federal outlays, federal debt, and M2 have each jumped ~50% in five years, while the Fed’s balance sheet soared by 90%. The “reward”: Real GDP cumulative growth per capita of 1.6% per year (a good chunk of which will be reversed during a recession).

Jul 08 2023

Not All Fed Pauses Are Equal

  • Jul 8, 2023

The latest pause is widely expected to be short-lived, but many things can happen to extend the pause or even completely end the tightening cycle. While some markets show little distinction between a final pause and an interim one, most behave in a way that’s consistent with the economic backdrop.

May 05 2023

The “K” Has Been “KO’d”

  • May 5, 2023

Volcker stormed to the scene to extinguish a blaze lit by others, while Powell battles a conflagration of his own making. Even if Powell executed a perfect, disinflationary soft landing, there may be something else in the cards: The magnitude of M2 shrinkage has resulted in the Marshallian K’s worst ever reading. 

Apr 07 2023

ISM: Down, But Not Out

  • Apr 7, 2023

Early evidence shows the recent banking calamity knocked down already-fragile measures of confidence and activity, as exhibited by the ISM Manufacturing Composite posting a fifth-consecutive reading below 50.

Mar 07 2023

Rose-Colored Remembrances

  • Mar 7, 2023

Monetary conditions have worsened, recession evidence is piling up, and some of our Large Cap valuation measures have returned to their tenth historical deciles. However, with the economy near full employment we thought it worth revisiting the past to find examples where the market might have temporarily thrived under similar circumstances.

Mar 07 2023

Inadvertent Easing?

  • Mar 7, 2023

Sometimes, a sharp upside reversal in the stock market will correctly anticipate future improvement in monetary and liquidity conditions. That was the case with the powerful up-leg that sprang from the market’s 2018 Christmas Eve bottom.

Jan 07 2023

A One-Hundred-Year Market Echo

  • Jan 7, 2023

Hopes that this decade might see a repeat of the “Roaring Twenties” took a hit last year. But there’s plenty of time to recover, and bulls will be encouraged to learn that cumulative stock market performance for this decade, thus far, is better than at the same point in the Roaring 1920s.  

Dec 01 2022

Jay Powell, The Chartist

  • Dec 1, 2022

When Jerome Powell took the reins of the Federal Reserve in early 2018, many commentators cheered the fact that he does not possess a Ph.D. in Economics. It will be many, many years before historians are able to conclude whether that’s a good or bad thing.

Yesterday’s action, though, left us wondering whether Powell might stealthily be in the process of earning a different designation—that of Chartered Market Technician (CMT). 

Oct 07 2022

Past Pivots Prompted By Politics

  • Oct 7, 2022

We scrutinized the typical path of money growth during the four-year presidential election cycle, and found that it typically tends to bottom out in October of the midterm year! The cycle says a monetary pivot is imminent, and the average pattern traced out by M2 suggests an acceleration in the growth rate of about 2.5% leading up to the presidential election. 

Oct 07 2022

Powell Doesn’t Need To Be Volcker

  • Oct 7, 2022

The current bear has been no more than moderate based on conventional measurements. However, the loss of market wealth in relation to GDP is not too far from the levels suffered during the Great Financial Crisis.

Oct 07 2022

Roaring Good Times...

  • Oct 7, 2022

Boy, were the pundits ever right about the Roaring Twenties. Less than three years into the decade, the animal they fear most has already roared two times. Actually, the first one, in the first quarter of 2020, was more like a piercing “yap,” taking the S&P 500 down almost 34% in just 23 trading days. The second roar has been a deeper, more guttural one that’s lasted nine months and is probably not done.

Sep 16 2022

Labor: Snatching Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory

  • Sep 16, 2022

This year it’s been popular to say the Fed will hike interest rates until it “breaks something.” Has that not already happened? Pull up charts of the Japanese yen, the British pound, and the euro, among others. And stateside, the Fed has broken one of economists’ favorite toys: the Phillips Curve.

Sep 08 2022

Fake-Out Or Break-Out?

  • Sep 8, 2022

“Don’t fight the Fed” was profitable advice dispensed almost daily by bulls in the 2nd half of 2020 and all of 2021. It’s been valuable advice in 2022, as well. However, when the Fed turned hostile earlier this year, the bulls deviated from their own sound advice and looked for new narratives.

Sep 08 2022

Tightening Into A Slowdown: Month Seven

  • Sep 8, 2022

An economy can slow to a standstill on a “real” basis while growing rapidly in nominal terms; it happens in emerging economies all the time. But this dichotomous condition now afflicts most of the developed world.

Sep 08 2022

Fed-Pivot Watch—Pivot Pushed Further Out

  • Sep 8, 2022

Since our July report, market action felt like the pivot had already occurred. However, according to our latest update, numerous measures have moved away from levels that would support a pivot. In other words, the eagerly-awaited Fed pivot has been pushed further out.

Aug 05 2022

The Yield Curve: Two “Perfect Records” At Stake

  • Aug 5, 2022

Yield curve action is getting harder to dismiss by the day. But which curve is the most relevant? We tried to answer that question in disciplined fashion in April. To our surprise, the “2s10s” spread that’s ubiquitous in bond-land scored near the bottom of the pack.

Aug 05 2022

LEI On The Precipice

  • Aug 5, 2022

The LEI’s 3.6% six-month annualized loss through September 2006 was the largest decline not followed almost immediately by a recession. This year, the LEI contracted by 3.7% over the six months through June—if a recession is avoided in the current experience, it would be the most misleading signal in the history of the LEI as currently constructed.

Jul 08 2022

Fed Pivot Watch

  • Jul 8, 2022

The late 2018 policy error and subsequent pivot of Chairman Powell’s rookie year is probably the best case-study for today’s pivot debate. Here we evaluate the current status of key pivot triggers and compare them to the readings of late 2018. Given the political environment and backward-looking nature of the Fed, we think the bar is higher for a pivot than the market hopes.

Jun 07 2022

Your “Free Lunch” Comes With A Tab

  • Jun 7, 2022

The market impact from money printing has been underwhelming when adjusted for the inflation it’s unleashed. Measured from the peaks associated with the first attempt at Quantitative Tightening, in inflation-adjusted terms, Small Caps, EAFE, and Emerging Markets all have losses.   

May 06 2022

Past Pivots Put Powell In A Predicament

  • May 6, 2022

Market conditions leading up to the May rate hike were similar (if not worse) than those that triggered Powell’s late-2018 “pivot.” Free-market tightening of 2022 is apt to play into the path of policy. There’s likely a dovish “pivot” in store later this year—one that may be aggressively sold rather than bought.

Mar 05 2022

Zigs And “Zags”

  • Mar 5, 2022

Like Gonzaga in the NCAA basketball tournament, stock market bulls are set for their first real test in a very long time.

Feb 05 2022

What “Causes” Inflation To Decline?

  • Feb 5, 2022

Last year’s consensus view that inflation would prove “transitory” missed the mark. There’s no reason for shame; inflation forecasting hadn’t been a required investment skill for the previous 30 years.

Feb 05 2022

Speed Trap Ahead?

  • Feb 5, 2022

In San Francisco, thefts of less than $950 have been decriminalized, while in Minneapolis, police are so beleaguered that car thefts not involving injury are ignored. Is it any wonder that the economy felt free to violate its usual stock market “speed limits” throughout much of 2021?  

Feb 05 2022

Easy Money? Not In Small Caps

  • Feb 5, 2022

One might have predicted that big beneficiaries of war-time-style levels of federal spending, financed by money printing, would be Small Cap stocks. And from March 2020 until March 2021, they were. But the larger picture is sobering. 

Feb 05 2022

A Failure of "Free Money"

  • Feb 5, 2022

Senator Rand Paul’s annual “Festivus” report on wasteful spending makes for sobering reading to the dwindling few who care about federal finances. The “low light” for 2021 was a $465,000 grant to the National Institute of Health for a study of pigeons playing slot machines.

Feb 05 2022

“Collared” By The Fed?

  • Feb 5, 2022

In late January, the S&P 500 was down so much (almost 10%!) that it revived talk of investors’ favorite “safe” security. No, not T-bills—and not even Amazon or Apple common stock—but the Fed “put.” Years ago, we called it the “hypothetical” Fed put. But by now, we’re believers.

Jan 28 2022

Small Caps’ Three-Year Ride To Nowhere

  • Jan 28, 2022

Yesterday, the Russell 2000 closed down 20.9% from its November 8th high, and market bulls have conceded it was “due” for a pullback after a 146% gain off the March-2020 COVID lows.

The Russell’s decline is moderate by the historical high-beta standards of Small Caps. However, this drop—combined with other developments transpiring over the last few years—has produced a shocking result: The Russell 2000 is now unchanged on an inflation-adjusted basis since its “Quantitative-Tightening Top” of August 31, 2018. But what a three-year ride it’s been!

Dec 07 2021

Is Powell A “Phillips Curve” Guy?

  • Dec 7, 2021

With consumer price inflation raging at 6.2% and few indications of an imminent rollover, Jay Powell has waved the white flag and retired the ill-begotten “transitory” descriptor. The timing of Powell’s concession is intriguing—perhaps he’s a fellow follower of a simple inflation model: the Output Gap.

Dec 07 2021

“Memes” Need Money Growth...

  • Dec 7, 2021

The extra months of QE “auto-pilot” failed to support some of the themes we’d have thought were the most likely to benefit from it—including IPOs, SPACs, Bitcoin, and the sky-high growers favored by the ARK Innovation ETF. Instead, the smart play with each of these assets was to ignore the ever-expanding Fed balance sheet and sell in February.

Nov 05 2021

Fed Taper—Not A Policy Error

  • Nov 5, 2021

We believe concerns about central-bank policy error are mostly a foreign issue, because they have moved much more aggressively than the Fed. The market has shown no indication of a Fed-policy mistake and we are still on board with the reflation trade.

Nov 05 2021

No Bark, No Bite?

  • Nov 5, 2021

If NBER is correct that a new economic expansion began in mid-2020, then this cycle is unfolding in “dog years.” After limiting between-meal snacks earlier this year, champion-breeder Jay Powell has informed his pack of canines that their portions will also be reduced as of later this month.

Nov 05 2021

Aging Prematurely

  • Nov 5, 2021

Regardless of one’s view on the maturity of today’s economic and market cycles, it’s hard to deny that the continuation of extraordinarily-loose economic policies is now causing those cycles to age prematurely. And no doubt it’s contributing to the premature “graying” of many market participants. 

Sep 08 2021

A Good Thing To Have In Reserve

  • Sep 8, 2021

It seems investors care mostly that the authorities have fiercely defended the S&P 500’s status as the World’s Reserve IndexTM. A decade of QE should have taught us that when the Fed conducts a decade’s worth of QE in little more than a year, U.S. Large Cap stocks benefit the most. 

Aug 06 2021

Liquidity Letdown?

  • Aug 6, 2021

Stock market liquidity might seem plentiful, with the Fed still buying $120 billion in bonds per month under the all-too-predictable continuation of what was first billed as an emergency operation. However, the steadiness of QE masks a major second-quarter reversal in “excess liquidity.”

Aug 06 2021

Sharing The Punch Bowl?

  • Aug 6, 2021

The gap between YOY growth rates in M2 and nominal GDP just flipped negative after four quarters of record-high readings. In other words, the recovering economy is now drinking from a punch bowl that the stock market once had all to itself. Similar drinking binges occurred in 2010 and 2018, both of which then experienced corrections north of 15%.

Jul 08 2021

Are High Prices A Form Of “Tightening?”

  • Jul 8, 2021

It’s certain that today’s cyclical bout of inflation will prove “transitory,” if only because the word itself is practically meaningless. Our time on earth will also prove transitory, and so too will the current stock market mania—to the shock of most of the nearly 20 million “investors” on the Robinhood platform.

Jun 05 2021

Ulterior Fed Motives?

  • Jun 5, 2021

In an echo of last decade, the Fed has come under fire for keeping crisis-based monetary policies in place well after a crisis has subsided. Predictably, the Fed rationalizes its uber-accommodation by citing the slowest-to-recover data series from a set of figures that already suffer from an inherent lag (labor market indicators).

Jun 05 2021

We’re The Government And We’re Here To Help

  • Jun 5, 2021

Our trusted civil servants must have found a list of our old Economic/Interest Rates/Inflation components and began to “discontinue” those once invaluable to us and other Fed watchers. It’s a hindrance, but we still have the one that is most correlated to stock prices and it’s free: The ever-expanding balance sheet.

Jun 05 2021

Time To Start Thinking About “Thinking About…”

  • Jun 5, 2021

The COVID collapse showed the Fed could abandon its clunky forward guidance and make the appropriate “pivot” when the facts changed. Now that facts have changed for the better, the Fed is right back to the rigid and dogmatic approach that characterized Fed-speak for almost all of the last economic expansion.

Jun 05 2021

What Should Quants Count?

  • Jun 5, 2021

On May 25th, Fed Chair Jerome Powell promised to pull back emergency support “very gradually over time and with great transparency.”

“Very gradually?” No one doubts that. But “with great transparency?” Not a chance...