The Fed Is on High Alert
It’s hard to believe the end of the year is upon us and 2020 is right around the corner.
In many ways, it went by very quickly. For economies and markets, it was a year marked by uncertainty over economic slowdowns, trade wars and a complete pivot in “dark money” policy initiated by the Federal Reserve and subsequently followed by other central banks around the world.
Notably this year, it wasn’t just the major nations that engaged in copycat monetary policy easing. It was a plethora of emerging-market central banks jumping on the same dark money bandwagon.
So as we head into the final FOMC meeting of the year next week, we know one thing for certain: The Fed won’t be cutting rates this time. And it’s recently used some fairly hawkish language.
But reinforcing the dovish outlook it adopted at the start of the year that precipitated three 2019 rate cuts, the Fed remains on high-alert mode.
There are two clear signs why…
First, the Fed keeps creating and dumping money into the front end of the U.S. yield curve through repo operations that it initiated in September.
How healthy is the banking sector overall?
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System recently published their annual Supervision and Regulation Report.
The report measures the financial condition of major U.S. banks, including loan growth and liquidity in the banking system.
Overall, 45% of U.S. banks with more than $100 billion in assets received a supervisory rating of “less than satisfactory.”
That’s not good. As we learned during that crisis, the stability of these large banks is essential to the health of our banking system.
Tellingly, the Federal Reserve report does not say which banks have these less-than-satisfactory ratings.
