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For Stocks & Bonds, Upside Surprise of Inflation and Interest Rates “Could Prove Nasty”: Dudley

December 6, 2020

For Stocks & Bonds, Upside Surprise of Inflation and Interest Rates “Could Prove Nasty”: Dudley

Five reasons to “worry about faster inflation.” It’s “a greater danger precisely because it’s no longer perceived as such.”

“Given how completely financial markets have come to expect low inflation and interest rates, and how much support those expectations are providing to bond and stock prices, an upside surprise could prove nasty,” says former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Bill Dudley, in a warning about how markets are ignoring the rising risks of inflation.

Companies have been raising prices, and they have been getting away with it. I’m not talking about prices at the gas station or grocery store which bounce up and down, but prices for things that are more stable, particularly services, where 70% of spending takes place, such as broadband services, shipping rates, and the regular highflyers, such as healthcare. Rents on a national basis are mix of plunging rents in some cities and surging rents in other cities. There has been inflation in goods too, including used-vehicle prices which have spiked by 15% since June,

Many of the restaurants that remained open raised their prices to deal with the additional costs and the decline in seating capacity during the Pandemic, and people are willing to pay those prices to support their restaurants. This happened across other industries that have cut capacity, triggering surging prices despite a decline in demand.

Some of these price increases happened because demand was red-hot, brought on by the sudden shifts to eating at home, working at home, learning at home, playing at home, and vacationing at home, and the other distortions brought about by the Weirdest Economy Ever. Other price increases happened because there were supply constraints due to the Pandemic, and the higher prices stuck.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Weekly Commentary: Dudley Sticks His Neck Out

September 6, 2019

Weekly Commentary: Dudley Sticks His Neck Out

What a fascinating environment; each week bringing something extraordinary. Yet there is this dreadful feeling that things are advancing toward some type of cataclysm.

“U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war with China keeps undermining the confidence of businesses and consumers, worsening the economic outlook. This manufactured disaster-in-the-making presents the Federal Reserve with a dilemma: Should it mitigate the damage by providing offsetting stimulus, or refuse to play along? If the ultimate goal is a healthy economy, the Fed should seriously consider the latter approach… There’s even an argument that the election itself falls within the Fed’s purview. After all, Trump’s reelection arguably presents a threat to the U.S. and global economy, to the Fed’s independence and its ability to achieve its employment and inflation objectives. If the goal of monetary policy is to achieve the best long-term economic outcome, then Fed officials should consider how their decisions will affect the political outcome in 2020.” Bill Dudley, Bloomberg op-ed, August 27, 2019

The former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s piece galvanized an overwhelmingly negative response. Virtually everyone agrees it would be an outrage for the Fed to take such a plunge into the political maelstrom.  

A Federal Reserve spokeswoman responded: “The Federal Reserve’s policy decisions are guided solely by its congressional mandate to maintain price stability and maximum employment. Political considerations play absolutely no role.”

Former Treasury official Larry Summers weighed in (from CNBC interview): “The Fed’s job is to stay out of politics. The Fed’s job is to respond to the best assessment they can make of economic conditions and adjust the economy – interest rates – appropriately… But for a trusted former official of the Fed, whose thinking is inevitably going to be tied to the Fed, to recommend that they raise interest rates so as to subvert the economy and influence a presidential election is grossly irresponsible – is an abuse of the privilege of being a former Fed official… It is not the job of non-elected appointed officials to a technocratic role to decide how they’re going to act so as to constrain and influence the behavior the President of the United States – and the behavior of the remainder of the government of the United States. That is to misunderstand entirely the role of appointed officials in a democracy.” 

“Deep State” Dudley Doubles Down: “Explains” What He Really Meant In Scandalous Anti-Trump Op-Ed

September 4, 2019

“Deep State” Dudley Doubles Down: “Explains” What He Really Meant In Scandalous Anti-Trump Op-Ed

There is a saying, when in a hole stop digging.

Unfortunately for former Goldman managing director and NY Fed president, Bill “let them eat iPads” Dudley, that is a saying he is not familiar with, and one week after his stunning Bloomberg op-ed in which he advocated the Fed to prevent Trump’s 2020 re-election by sending the economy in a recession, resulting in a brutal response from virtually everyone who slammed Dudley’s musings as the final proof that the Fed was in fact a political animal, one which is more powerful than the executive branch in its ability to pick and choose presidents, Dudley is out with an “explainer”, seeking to “answer” some of the main questions posed by his “provocative” piece.

After reading “What I Meant When I Said ‘Don’t Enable Trump“, let’s just say that Dudley fails in explaining why he said is not what he said, and if anything he has successfully doubled down, giving Trump even more ammunition to throw the book at the political Fed for not cutting rates fast enough as the president has been demanding for months, and for eventually taking the blame for the coming economic and market crash.

Dudley’s letter, written in rhetorical Q&A format, begins by asking himself what motivated him to write this article. His answer is two fold:

First, President Trump’s trade war with China was increasing uncertainty about how global trading rules would evolve, what tariffs would be imposed, what changes firms might need to make to their global supply chains, and what the downside risks might be for the U.S. economy. Just a few days before the article was published, the president ordered U.S. firms to pull out of China.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Weekly Commentary: Dudley Sticks His Neck Out

September 3, 2019

Weekly Commentary: Dudley Sticks His Neck Out

What a fascinating environment; each week bringing something extraordinary. Yet there is this dreadful feeling that things are advancing toward some type of cataclysm.

“U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war with China keeps undermining the confidence of businesses and consumers, worsening the economic outlook. This manufactured disaster-in-the-making presents the Federal Reserve with a dilemma: Should it mitigate the damage by providing offsetting stimulus, or refuse to play along? If the ultimate goal is a healthy economy, the Fed should seriously consider the latter approach… There’s even an argument that the election itself falls within the Fed’s purview. After all, Trump’s reelection arguably presents a threat to the U.S. and global economy, to the Fed’s independence and its ability to achieve its employment and inflation objectives. If the goal of monetary policy is to achieve the best long-term economic outcome, then Fed officials should consider how their decisions will affect the political outcome in 2020.” Bill Dudley, Bloomberg op-ed, August 27, 2019

The former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s piece galvanized an overwhelmingly negative response. Virtually everyone agrees it would be an outrage for the Fed to take such a plunge into the political maelstrom.  

A Federal Reserve spokeswoman responded: “The Federal Reserve’s policy decisions are guided solely by its congressional mandate to maintain price stability and maximum employment. Political considerations play absolutely no role.”

Former Treasury official Larry Summers weighed in (from CNBC interview): “The Fed’s job is to stay out of politics. The Fed’s job is to respond to the best assessment they can make of economic conditions and adjust the economy – interest rates – appropriately…

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Weekly Commentary: Dudley on Debt and MMT

February 26, 2019

Weekly Commentary: Dudley on Debt and MMT

December’s market instability and resulting Fed capitulation to the marketplace continue to reverberate. At this point, markets basically assume the Fed is well into the process of terminating policy normalization. Only a couple of months since completing its almost $3.0 TN stimulus program, markets now expect the ECB to move forward with some type of additional stimulus measures (likely akin to its long-term refinancing operations/LTRO). There’s even talk that the Bank of Japan could, once again, ramp up its interminable “money printing” operations (BOJ balance sheet $5.0 TN… and counting). Manic global markets have briskly moved way beyond a simple Fed “pause.”

There was the Thursday Reuters article (Howard Schneider and Jonathan Spicer): “A Fed Pivot, Born of Volatility, Missteps, and New Economic Reality: The Federal Reserve’s promise in January to be ‘patient’ about further interest rate hikes, putting a three-year-old process of policy tightening on hold, calmed markets after weeks of turmoil that wiped out trillions of dollars of household wealth. But interviews with more than half a dozen policymakers and others close to the process suggest it also marked a more fundamental shift that could define Chairman Jerome Powell’s tenure as the point where the Fed first fully embraced a world of stubbornly weak inflation, perennially slower growth and permanently lower interest rates.”

And then Friday from the Financial Times (Sam Fleming): “Slow-inflation Conundrum Prompts Rethink at the Federal Reserve: Ten years into the recovery and with unemployment near half-century lows, the Federal Reserve’s traditional models suggest inflation should be surging. Instead, officials are grappling with unexpectedly tepid price growth, prompting some to rethink their strategy for steering the US economy. John Williams, the New York Fed president, said on Friday that persistently soft inflation readings over recent years could damage the Fed’s ability to convince the general public it will hit its 2% goal.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Weekly Commentary: Dudley on Debt and MMT

February 24, 2019

Weekly Commentary: Dudley on Debt and MMT

December’s market instability and resulting Fed capitulation to the marketplace continue to reverberate. At this point, markets basically assume the Fed is well into the process of terminating policy normalization. Only a couple of months since completing its almost $3.0 TN stimulus program, markets now expect the ECB to move forward with some type of additional stimulus measures (likely akin to its long-term refinancing operations/LTRO). There’s even talk that the Bank of Japan could, once again, ramp up its interminable “money printing” operations (BOJ balance sheet $5.0 TN… and counting). Manic global markets have briskly moved way beyond a simple Fed “pause.”

There was the Thursday Reuters article (Howard Schneider and Jonathan Spicer): “A Fed Pivot, Born of Volatility, Missteps, and New Economic Reality: The Federal Reserve’s promise in January to be ‘patient’ about further interest rate hikes, putting a three-year-old process of policy tightening on hold, calmed markets after weeks of turmoil that wiped out trillions of dollars of household wealth. But interviews with more than half a dozen policymakers and others close to the process suggest it also marked a more fundamental shift that could define Chairman Jerome Powell’s tenure as the point where the Fed first fully embraced a world of stubbornly weak inflation, perennially slower growth and permanently lower interest rates.”

And then Friday from the Financial Times (Sam Fleming): “Slow-inflation Conundrum Prompts Rethink at the Federal Reserve: Ten years into the recovery and with unemployment near half-century lows, the Federal Reserve’s traditional models suggest inflation should be surging. Instead, officials are grappling with unexpectedly tepid price growth, prompting some to rethink their strategy for steering the US economy.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bill Dudley Slams MMT: “It Failed In Germany, Venezuela And Zimbabwe”

February 19, 2019

Bill Dudley Slams MMT: “It Failed In Germany, Venezuela And Zimbabwe”

While there has been much disagreement among the financial elite about the ultimate consequences of central bank activism and market manipulation, with some – usually those who do not manage money for a living and are not paid by investors – predicting fire and brimstone, while a separate, far more optimistic group expects the world’s greatest experiment in monetary policy to somehow have a happy ending, when it comes to socialism disguised as monetary policy, besides a certain, politically-influenced fringe, the condemnation against “helicopter money” wrapped in a convenient political wrapper has mostly been uniform.

We are talking, of course, about MMT, which stands for Modern Money Theory, but would make far more sense if it stood stand for Magic Money Tree, as the theory effectively espouses unlimited money printing and skipping central banks as intermediaries in money creation which, however, the theory claims does not result in hyperinflation because, somehow, taxation manages to limit the amount of money in circulation and the result is monetary utopia.

It is therefore hardly a surprise that MMT has emerged as the pet financial theory for such socialist politicians as Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Jones (the biggest proponent of MMT is finance professor Stephanie Kelton who previously worked on Sanders’ presidential campaign and was a “chief economist for the Dems on the Senate Budget Committee”), who get to promise their potential voters pretty much everything while also vowing not to worry about the insane costs that delivering “everything” would entail (AOC’s Green New Deal is said to cost over $6 trillion and according to some, the bill would be north of $20 trillion).

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Central Bankers’ Malodorous War On Savers

August 30, 2015

The Central Bankers’ Malodorous War On Savers

Well, that didn’t take long!

After just three days of market turmoil the monetary politburo swung into action. This time they sent out B-Dud to promise still another monetary sweetener. Said the head of the New York Fed,

“From my perspective, at this moment, the decision to begin the normalization process at the September FOMC meeting seems less compelling to me than it was a few weeks ago.”.

Needless to say, “B-Dud” is a moniker implying extreme disrespect, and  Bill Dudley deserves every bit of it. He is a crony capitalist fool and one of the Fed ring-leaders prosecuting a relentless, savage war on savers. Its only purpose is to keep carry trade speculators gorged with free funding in the money markets and to bloat the profits of Wall Street strip-mining operations, like that of his former employer, Goldman Sachs.

The fact is, any one who doesn’t imbibe in the Keynesian Kool-Aid dispensed by the central banking cartel can see in an instant that 80 months of ZIRP has done exactly nothing for the main street economy. Notwithtanding the Fed’s gussied-up theories about monetary “accommodation” and closing the “output gap” the litmus test is real simple.

To wit, artificial suppression of free market interest rates by the central bank is designed to cause households to borrow more money than they otherwise would in order to spend more than they earn, pure and simple. Its nothing more than a modernized version of the original, crude Keynesian pump-priming theory—–except it dispenses with the inconvenience of getting politicians to approve spending increases and tax cuts in favor of the writ of a small posse of unelected monetary mandarins who run the FOMC and peg money market interest rates at will.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

It’s Official: China Confirms It Has Begun Liquidating Treasuries, Warns Washington

August 27, 2015

It’s Official: China Confirms It Has Begun Liquidating Treasuries, Warns Washington

On Tuesday evening, we asked what would happen if emerging markets joined China in dumping US Treasurys. For months we’ve documented the PBoC’s liquidation of its vast stack of US paper. Back in July for instance, we noted that China had dumped a record $143 billion in US Treasurys in three months via Belgium,leaving Goldman speechless for once.

We followed all of this up this week by noting that thanks to the new FX regime (which, in theory anyway, should have required less intervention), China has likely sold somewhere on the order of $100 billion in US Treasurys in the past two weeks alone in open FX ops to steady the yuan. Put simply, as part of China’s devaluation and subsequent attempts to contain said devaluation, China has been purging an epic amount of Treasurys.

But even as the cat was out of the bag for Zero Hedge readers and even as, to mix colorful escape metaphors, the genie has been out of the bottle since mid-August for China which, thanks to a steadfast refusal to just float the yuan and be done with it, will have to continue selling USTs by the hundreds of billions, the world at large was slow to wake up to what China’s FX interventions actually implied until Wednesday when two things happened: i) Bloomberg, citing fixed income desks in New York, noted “substantial selling pressure” in long-term USTs emanating from somebody in the “Far East”, and ii) Bill Gross asked, in a tweet, if China was selling Treasurys.

Sure enough, on Thursday we got confirmation of what we’ve been detailing exhaustively for months. Here’s Bloomberg:

China has cut its holdings of U.S. Treasuries this month to raise dollars needed to support the yuan in the wake of a shock devaluation two weeks ago, according to people familiar with the matter.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

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