monetary policy

Two notable events regarding stock and bond markets have occurred in the last twenty-four hours. One is comments from Fed Chair Janet Yellen that suggest she sees U.S. equity prices as elevated. The second is a wide-spread backup in yields…

My thesis for the global economy right now is that global nominal GDP growth will continue to slow, leading to more policy accommodation, with the outliers converging toward zero. The question mark in this is the Federal Reserve. Generally,…

I don’t think we got any new information from the economy or the Fed yesterday. While the GDP report was below expectations, it was exactly where the Atlanta Fed said it would be. And the Fed has not altered its stance. It is prepared to…

Yesterday was a big conference day in Washington, D.C., with the IMF and World Bank meeting and with the Brookings Institution holding an event featuring the Greek and German finance ministers. While I attended the Brookings event, the…

This past week, I have been focusing on the US economy and the Fed’s reaction function. I would summarize my view as positive about the cyclical trajectory of the US economy but concerned about so-called secular stagnation due to high…

As I indicated yesterday, if the Fed is narrowly focused on the long-term path of inflation and arriving at a NAIRU-style full employment threshold, the data are relatively categorical that liftoff must begin this summer. However, I believe…

The biggest question facing the Federal reserve is whether their data dependency means looking through weak Q1 data and raising rates this summer anyway. Given the key elements of the Fed’s reaction function as I laid them out yesterday,…

The title of this post is what the Fed wants us to believe. It wants us to believe that it is prepared to raise interest rates this year but that it will increase them slowly by assessing the data, hiking once and re-assessing, and then…

The last post was an attempt to describe a reasonable worse case scenario for the US real economy as relatively benign compared to 1937, a comparison making the rounds these days due to a piece by Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio. My point is that…

The title of this post is a bit alarmist. But what I intend to write is more about reasonable worst case economic scenarios that the Fed is looking to avoid. While a 1937-style downdraft is something to consider down the line, in the…