NDR Fixed Income Allocation Strategy August 2024 Update

One might have expected yesterday’s CPI data to be of significance for asset prices. As it happened the figures were interesting, with the inflation data surprising to the high side: marginally, but still a miss, while core CPI actually increased for the 2nd month. Hardly proof of resurgent inflation but notable in the context of a series which has been trending lower since Sep 2022. But asset prices didn’t seem to notice the miss. Perhaps that’s because policymakers hardly noticed it either. The quote above came from the NY Fed Williams yesterday, and seems to be representative of policymakers’ focus shifting from inflation to the labor market. So perhaps markets took that cue and paid more attention to the rather striking weekly claims figure (258k). Read more →