Tag: Fed monetary policy

What To Expect From Powell 2.0

Posted on by George Yacik

By renominating Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve chair over Fed governor Lael Brainard, whom he nominated to be Vice-Chair, President Biden has supposedly chosen the safer and less political route. But rest assured that in Powell's second term, which requires Senate confirmation, likely to be a slam dunk, the Fed will be involved in politics like never before.

That's because Biden has several other seats to fill on the seven-member Fed board of governors, and the composition and thinking of that board promises to be a lot different than the current roster, even if it has the same chair. It will likely move more aggressively to implement the current administration's progressive policies.

Indeed, while Biden may have chosen Powell to serve another term, it will likely be Sen. Elizabeth Warren and her acolytes who will have the biggest influence on Fed policy in the years to come.

The most important seat other than the top two is likely to be that of the vice chair for supervision, currently held by Randal Quarles, who said he plans to resign from the Fed board by the end of the year. If Sen. Warren and her allies have their way, that position will go to someone who will further the left's agenda to impose and enforce stricter regulations on banks, including climate change policies. Continue reading "What To Expect From Powell 2.0" →

The Fed's Role In GameStop

Posted on by The INO.com Team

All of the news articles and media commentary on the volatility in GameStop (GME) stock last week centered on the supposed war between retail investors who were buying the stock, putting a squeeze on those evil rich hedge-fund managers who had shorted the stock. And the Davids, at least for now, were beating the Goliaths. Good versus evil is always easy to understand and makes for a compelling story, especially when "the little guy" prevails.

Morality play aside, a lot of people were probably scratching their heads as to why some people would be so enthusiastic about buying stock in a company that appears to be 10 years behind the times, seeing as how its main business consists of selling or reselling physical copies of digital games even as the rest of the world has moved onto streaming. It also cast a lot of attention on short-selling, with many people receiving a crash course in the tactic.

However, it's also another example of how the Federal Reserve's super-loose monetary policy and 0% interest rates are distorting investor behavior. While retail investors on Robinhood and other platforms are driving up the price of what otherwise might be a stock headed in the other direction, we need to remember one of the reasons why investors are willing to make such outlandish bets like this.

It demonstrates the lengths some investors will go to make money because it's become difficult to do so in more conventional (i.e., safe) investments, such as quality stocks and bonds. It also reveals the almost devil-may-care attitude some investors have adopted, believing that the Fed will eventually ride to their rescue. Continue reading "The Fed's Role In GameStop" →

United States Still Going Bananas

Posted on by Gary Tanashian

You see, it’s not a Trump thing. It’s an ‘America is so hopelessly indebted (as are other developed economies) that they have no choice now’ thing.

However, the election shakes out – most likely Democrat president and congress, Republican senate – the stock market is cheering two things in my opinion. It is cheering US dollar compromising fiscal stimulus (Fed prints, politicians spend) and the coming of more US dollar compromising monetary policy (Fed prints, Fed monetizes bonds AKA debt, Fed screws with any other esoteric tool it can get its hands on in the age of MMT TMM, AKA Total Market Manipulation).

I have a still profitable position against the Euro that is about to tick un-profitable this morning. That was my hedge against a firming US dollar, which is the anti-market to the US stock market especially, but also to many global markets because I am long US and global stocks. I may have to pull back to hedging stocks (including gold stocks) with high cash levels. So says the ongoing inflationary operation.

I had projected an A-B-C bear market bounce in Uncle Buck, just to keep the macro honest and put a spook into market bulls. But it appears – due to the joy breaking out everywhere – that I will have been wrong about ‘C’. That’s what this breakdown below support (now short-term resistance) says, anyway.

dxy market

We are going bananas not because Trump is/was just another politician when it comes to the modern American tradition of debt-leveraged inflation to disenfranchise the middle and poor and enrich the already spectacularly wealthy. We are going bananas because Continue reading "United States Still Going Bananas" →

Let's Move Forward, Not Back

Posted on by George Yacik

Since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, the Federal Reserve has probably done more to try to ease the financial pain of businesses, consumers, and institutions than just about any other organization on earth with their monetary policy. It’s lowered interest rates, purchased trillions of dollars of assets – some of which, like corporate bonds, it’s never bought before – eased bank capital requirements, and increased existing or created new lending programs to help Americans weather the storm and get back on their feet.

Now the president of the Minneapolis Fed and a current voting member of the Fed’s monetary policy committee is calling on people to suffer a few more weeks in quarantine in order to get the virus under control and the economy back on an upward trajectory – as if it weren’t on that already.

“If we were to lock down really hard, I know I hate to even suggest it. People will be frustrated by it,” Neel Kashkari told CBS’s Face the Nation program. “But if we were to lock down hard for a month or six weeks, we could get the case count down so that our testing and our contact tracing was actually enough to control it the way that it's happening in the Northeast right now. That’s the only way we’re really going to have a real robust economic recovery.”

“Now, if we don't do that and we just have this raging virus spreading throughout the country with flare-ups and local lockdowns for the next year or two, which is entirely possible, we're going to see many, many more business bankruptcies, small businesses, big businesses, and that's going to take a lot of time to recover from to rebuild those businesses and then to bring workers back in and re-engage them in the workforce. That's going to be a much slower recovery for all of us.”

If we take his advice and do another “hard lockdown” for six weeks or a month, how many more businesses will fail, and how many more people will be laid off or lose their jobs permanently in the meantime? Continue reading "Let's Move Forward, Not Back" →

Disconnect? What Disconnect?

Posted on by George Yacik

Over the past few weeks, the financial news media has been marveling at what it calls the “disconnect” between stock prices and the economy. Economic and health statistics are likely to go from bad – 30 million unemployed in the past month, a 4.8% drop in first-quarter GDP, an 8.7% drop in retail sales in April, more reported coronavirus cases and deaths – to worse – a nearly 40% drop in GDP and around 15% unemployment in the second quarter, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest projections. Yet the stock market has blissfully regained about half of the 34% drop it sustained between mid-February and mid-March.

But is there really a disconnect? Does the economy – now largely controlled by the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury Department – still have any correlation to what happens in the stock market anymore, and vice versa? Well, the answer is yes, but not in the way it used to. What’s happening is that as the economy goes deeper into the red, the more it prompts the government to pump in more money and for the Fed to intervene more in the financial markets. That is unquestionably good for stocks.

We have been in an environment since the 2008 financial crisis where the Fed has played an unprecedented activist role in the bond market and, indirectly, the stock market. That role has grown further under Chair Jerome Powell, who seems to believe it’s the Fed’s job to rescue equity investors any time stock prices correct, never mind what’s going on in the economy. Now that we’re in the middle of an economic downturn that makes 2008 look like a garden-variety recession, the Fed has put its monetary policy and quantitative-easing engines into Continue reading "Disconnect? What Disconnect?" →