The Fed’s Dovish Twist – Only Surprising on the Surface
Rate Cuts, Money Printer Go Brrr, and Biden
“The Federal Reserve is not only too big to fail, it’s too big to be held accountable.”
~ Thomas Massie
Last week at its Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, the Fed made it clear that it will go back to stoking inflation.
Leaving the Fedspeak aside, here’s the gist: The Fed wants to cut interest rates three times this year, each time by 0.25%, with the goal of reaching a range between 4.55% to 4.75%.
That’s the plan for 2024. But the Fed’s expectation is to lower them even further in 2025 and 2026.
Now, this is quite a turn… and quite an odd one at that in terms of the timing. First, you’ve got the stock market recently hitting all-time highs. Gold and Bitcoin are also hovering near their all-time highs.
And hold on a second, isn’t the Fed supposed to be fighting inflation? Didn’t it come in pretty hot recently?
It did.
The PCE (or Personal Consumption Expenditures) — the Fed’s preferred gauge for measuring inflation — jumped by 0.4% in January, hitting its fastest pace in almost a year.
The inflation report for December was not great either.
Leaving aside the fact that the whole core PCE thing is a sham because it excludes food and energy (the two things Americans depend on the most), the Fed, being all “data-dependent,” is shrugging off the data it doesn’t like.
Alright, that’s pretty noteworthy on its own, but that wasn’t the only jaw-dropping news from the Fed last week.
It came from Fed Chair Jerome Powell himself, who suggested that the central bank could ease quantitative tightening (QT) “fairly soon.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
