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Thoughts From The Divide: High Times and Happy Endings

BY JON WEBB
“I think it was the right decision, and I think it should send a signal that we, that we’re committed to coming up with a good outcome here” There is no verse in scripture that says “blessed be the dovish, for they shall fatten the sacred bull”. More’s the pity, because it would have been apt. James Macintosh seems to have noticed the same, but framed it slightly differently. Nothing says I love you to asset markets more than Fed rate cuts: the original PCA factor. And to be fair, the admiration appears to be mutual: Powell loves markets and markets love Powell. It’s nice to get positive feedback and it’s not like JP had to drag everyone screaming and kicking. Read more →

Thoughts From The Divide: Particularly Fluid

BY JON WEBB
Now a week out from the Fed making it clear that the squeeze of lower growth isn’t worth the juice of bringing inflation back to (not toward, Jerry!) 2%, Mohamed El-Erian summed up the state of play nicely in a recent article for the FT. The Queens’ College president noted that, “It is not often that you see a reputable central bank revise up its inflation and growth projections and yet strengthen a dovish tilt to its policy stance. Yet that is what happened in Washington last week when the Federal Reserve raised those projections up a notch and yet delivered two consequential signals – a willingness to tolerate higher inflation for longer and an openness to slow the ongoing reduction in its balance sheet.” Read more →

Thoughts From The Divide: The Moon

BY JON WEBB
If the Fed can “only know” the neutral rate (and hence whether policy is restrictive) “by its works”… there may be reason to think that the music is still playing. Whether it’s the price surges of misspelled celebrity memecoins ICOs such as “Joram Poowel” (a coin based on Elizabeth Warren was the “Top gainer” at the time of writing), the return of the Manufacturing PMI to positive territory “for the first time in 17 months”, or the simple good old fashioned break out of gold to all-time highs (sympathy to all mining stock bros, miners have failed to attract the same level of enthusiasm), the “restrictive” territory being bandied about seems less of a place of economic pain, and more one of milk and honey. Read more →
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