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Thoughts From The Divide: Lack of Action

BY JON WEBB
It’s another week of heavy-hitting inflation data, with PPI coming in hotter than expected, CPI was in line with expectations on a year-on-year basis, and import prices “rose by the most in two years in April amid rising costs for energy products and other goods”. Under the hood, both CPI and import prices showed additional signs of running hot, with the latter featuring an upwardly revised 0.6% month-on-month change in March, and the CPI data, including hot readings in some of the niches and metrics followed by Powell et al., such as the  4.0% annualized reading in six-month Core CPI and a sobering 6.0% annualized reading in six-month Core Services. Read more →

Thoughts From The Divide: Little Tweaks and Adjustments

BY JON WEBB
“I actually think we’re going to see inflation be choppy, and I expect that we’ll see employment stay robust.” As we noted back in May, “one swallow does not make spring”. But if we are to follow the advice of Keynes/Samuelson, when information changes, we should adjust our conclusions. Blast! The trick is, of course, balancing the two ideas to adjust conclusions when the evidence suggests such an adjustment is appropriate: you might call it Bayesian inference. The above quote from Bostic illustrates the problem, with the Atlanta Fed head implicitly stating that he will be ignoring any hot inflation prints. Read more →

Thoughts From the Divide:  Subjest to Change

BY JON WEBB
As the saying goes, “needs must when the devil drives”. We have no problem understanding the Fed’s decision to announce (at 7pm last night) that the details of the BTFP program needed to be altered. The problem was the overly juicy arbitrage, whereby banks could use the BTFP window to flip cash from the Fed into the RRP and pocket the not-insubstantial difference. We were impressed by the chutzpah involved in arbitraging two Fed facilities! Read more →
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