Tag Archives: Interest Rates

Fed Speak: Yellen the Dove

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There have been a lot of Fed speakers; so, I’ve selected a few comments on Yellen’s speech, as she has been deemed the most dovish Fed bank president.

Note the shift in rhetoric from ‘market functioning’ to inflation.

Of course, the FOMC’s idea of getting tough and fighting inflation has been to only cut 25 basis points.

Data dependent, this seems to be changing.

It could be the signs of passthrough from headline to core CPI or signs inflation expectations are elevating (as per their recent comments).

They also seem to have lost confidence in their inflation forecasts and may not be giving their future inflation indicators the same weight as in the past 6 months.

Fed’s Yellen: Funds rate been cut enough for now

by Ros Krasny

(Reuters) – San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President Janet Yellen said on Wednesday that the federal funds rate has been lowered far enough for now after months of aggressive central bank rate cuts.

The Fed’s key monetary policy tool ‘has come way down,’ Yellen said while critiquing presentations on the economy at a symposium for college students organized by the San Francisco Fed and the Pacific Northwest Regional Economic Conference.

Yellen said the Fed continues to grapple with difficult policy choices but restated that high inflation was a worry. ‘The 1970s were a horrible period. If there’s one thing that has to be very high priority, we don’t want to go back to a period that is anything like that,’ she said.


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Re: Federal Reserve Announcement

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(an email exchange)

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 9:44 AM, Jeff wrote:

The Fed announced today that, starting May 5th, it was expanding its cash-loan biweekly auctions for banks (Term Auction Facility or TAF) by 50% to $75 billion each auction.  This was the third increase in the four months the program has existed.  The Fed also expanded the collateral accepted for the US Treasuries to include other AAA private-label mbs securities,

good, it should be open to any member bank assets- they are all occ legal anyway

in addition to the residential and commercial mbs and agency CMOs that it already accepts.  It also increased its currency swap facility with the ECB to $50 billion and with the Swiss National Bank to $12 billion and extended the terms through January 2009. 

interesting that the ECB needs more dollars.  if there is going to be a systemic failure it’s in the eurozone.

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FOMC Analysis

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On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 7:43 AM, Karim wrote:

Sorry for delay—was in transit yday.

Recent information indicates that economic activity remains weak. Household and business spending has been subdued and labor markets have softened further. Financial markets remain under considerable stress, and tight credit conditions and the deepening housing contraction are likely to weigh on economic growth over the next few quarters.

Note: Economic activity not weakening further and credit conditions not tightening further, but remain ‘weak’ and ‘tight’, respectively. Housing contraction still deepening and labor market still softening.

So we remain stuck around 0% growth with tight credit conditions and a worsening labor market..

Although readings on core inflation have improved somewhat, energy and other commodity prices have increased, and some indicators of inflation expectations have risen in recent months. The Committee expects inflation to moderate in coming quarters, reflecting a projected leveling-out of energy and other commodity prices and an easing of pressures on resource utilization. Still, uncertainty about the inflation outlook remains high. It will be necessary to continue to monitor inflation developments carefully.

Note: Removed ‘inflation remains elevated’ and uncertainty about inflation has not increased, but ‘remains high’.

Feeling a little better about inflation but way too early to sound all-clear.

The substantial easing of monetary policy to date, combined with ongoing measures to foster market liquidity, should help to promote moderate growth over time and to mitigate risks to economic activity. The Committee will continue to monitor economic and financial developments and will act as needed to promote sustainable economic growth and price stability.

Note: Removed downside risks remain and ‘act in a timely manner’.

Don’t see growth falling much below the -1% to +1% range and will likely not ease at the June meeting.

I agree with former FOMC member Poole who described the statement as ‘hardly a loud and clear signal’ of a pause.

I think the Fed stands ready to ease further if fiscal action (notable in its absence in the statement) and prior eases don’t gain traction over the course of H2.

Agreed with all.

The FOMC continues to ‘trust their models’ and forecast declining inflation.

The economy continues to muddle through with GDP just north of 0, with CPI remaining north of 4% for what is adding up to a substantial period of time.

What the Fed is saying is that the current output gap/’resource utilization level’ is more than adequate to bring down cpi as per their forecasts.

This is what the mainstream would call a very high risk strategy, with the risk being that the cost of bringing down inflation later will be a lot higher than it would have been to bring it down sooner.

 

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Re: WSJ: Greg Ip’s Article

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right, it’s a way to keep the ff rate from falling below target, but does nothing for ‘liquidity’ that’s not already being done.

seems fomc maybe still struggling with ‘monetary operations’

From: Adam
Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 3:59 AM
To: a
Subject: CS: DEF WORTH A READ – GREG IP ARTICLE THAT PROPOSES ANOTHER FED INNOVATION – ALL EXPLAINED BELOW

 

Greg Ip’s piece in the WSJ received some attention today. The piece is titled “ Fed to Consider Paying Interest To Commercial Banks on Reserves” and states that the Fed will discuss this proposal at todays meeting. There is no suggestion that the Fed are about to immediately change the current standard policy of paying zero per-cent for reserve balances, but given that the press had a very good lead on the introduction of the TSLF and PDCF it’s prudent to pay attention. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120941973079950909.html?mod=economy_lead_story_lsc)

The reason for changing policy and paying interest on reserve balances is not at first obvious, but is in fact a simple way for the Fed to solve the problem of increasing cash liquidity in the banking system without driving down the Fed effective rate. As the Fed take illiquid asset-backed securities from banks they hand over cash in return. As banks get zero interest on reserve balances that are left with the Fed they quickly seek to place their newly raised cash out into the market, earning a coupon on their investment instead of earning nothing on a reserve balance. As the Fed pay nothing it is in every banks interest to lend any excess balances at rates greater than zero, and what typically happens is that the cash market rate falls dramatically as cash rich banks try and find bids, offering at lower and lower rates until we get close to zero. This is an unwelcome development from the Fed’s perspective as the effective Fed Funds rate that results is often significantly lower than the official Fed target rate. By injecting large amounts of cash liquidity into the system the Fed may actually undermine their own target rate.

Paying a coupon on reserve balances would allow the Fed to inject as much cash via asset-backed repo as they like without needing to worry about driving down the Fed effective cash rate. The Fed would effectively sterilize their own cash injection by placing a guaranteed fixed rate floor on reserve funds, and ensuring that something close to the Fed Funds target rate was achieved. This would mean that the Fed could continue to increase the amount of repo’s that they are willing to undertake and to upsize the auctions without concerns about the effects of huge amounts of excess cash

sloshing around in the system.

Some thoughts to go along with this:

  • Great care needs to be taken in setting guaranteed cash levels. Sometimes unexpected consequences result. Central banks like the RBA and RBNZ  have long operated a cash system which guarantees a floor on overnight rates at a margin below the target rate. This ensures that cash generally trades close to the target rate, or slightly rich to it. Generally local market participants prefer to hold an excess of long balances in the knowledge that cash shortages often occur, but they have a defined downside guarantee. In New Zealand’s case the RBNZ found that banks were hoarding cash to such an extent that the short dated market traded significantly above the OCR target because the banks had a 25bp downside guarantee. It wasn’t until the RBNZ reduced the guaranteed floor substantially that rates traded much closer to target.

 

Banks that get cash from the Fed via the PDCF currently seek to off-load that cash to the street, effectively spreading liquidity to all elements of the banking system, and discouraging the holding of very short term balances which will end of earning 0% if they are not on-lent. If the Fed’s guaranteed rate is not far enough below the FF target rate Banks will simply recycle any excess back to the Fed rather than taking unsecured interbank credit risk. This may leave the smaller regional Banks without direct Fed access short of cash, forcing them to pay a premium instead of getting funds at a discount. The challenge of course is that if the rate is set too far below the Fed Fund’s Target rate the Fed will have the same problem of the effective daily rate printing substantially beneath target. An appropriate margin that the Fed should pay on reserves is likely to be around 50bp below the target rate. This will prevent the Fed effective rate from collapsing, but the 50bp penalty will also incentivise banks to find alternative borrowers wherever possible

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Wed am recap

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Mainstream economics says:

Get inflation right and that ‘automatically’ optimizes long-term growth and employment.

Adding to demand with a negative supply shock turns a ‘relative value story’ into an ‘inflation story.’

The ECB is following mainstream theory, while the Fed is not.

why?

The Fed sees looming systemic, deflationary tail risk at the door. At least up to now.

The panic of 1907 and the early 1930s deflationary collapse (both previous examples given by the Fed) were gold standard events.

With a gold standard (and/or other fixed rate regimes) there are direct supply side constraints on the reserve currency. Interest rates are market determined, and during a credit crunch rates spike higher ‘automatically.’ Even the treasury must fund itself and faces the same supply side constraints, thereby limiting fiscal responses. This continues in today’s fixed fx currencies.

With floating fx/non-convertible currency there are inherent no direct supply side constraints on bank lending, deposit creation, and credit in general. Any constraints are on the demand side, including financial capital where constraints are also on the demand side. The CB necessarily directly sets rates, not market forces, and government spending is not constrained by taxing, borrowing, etc., hence fiscal packages are subject only to political choice.

Today’s risks are much the same as previous financial crisis type risks like 1987 and 1998, where the government and its agencies have the open option of ‘writing the check’ as desired, with inflation the price to pay, not government solvency as with fixed fx regimes.

Just like the 1970s, the Saudis are acting the swing producer and setting price and letting quantity they pump adjust. This is also necessarily the case when one is single supplier at the margin with excess capacity. The alternative of pumping flat out and hitting bids in the spot market is not a functional option for any monopolist. Only price setting is.

Russia is also a monopoly supplier at the margin and probably is also acting as a swing producer. So crude prices go to where the higher of the two set them.

Mainstream theory has not yet publicly addressed this kind of negative supply shock.

One option is to match the domestic inflation rates to the price hikes to try to avoid declining real terms of trade.

This is both politically impossible, and it can quickly lead to accelerating inflation.

We have two choices, neither particularly attractive:

  1. Watch our real terms of trade continue to collapse as crude prices are continuously hiked.
  2. Try to inflate to moderate the drop in real terms of trade.

Ironically, we will chose the later as we did in the 1970s because inflation is not a function of interest rates in the direction CBs subscribe to.

Increasing nominal rates increases inflation via the cost and demand channels.

Costs of holding inventory and investment rise with rate hikes.

Governments are net payers of interest to the non-government sectors; so, rate hikes also increase government spending on interest to support incomes in the non-government sectors.

Good luck to us!

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Changing Tides

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I’ve been thinking that when the Fed turns its attention to inflation it will find itself way behind that curve, which it is by any mainstream standard, and that the curve then gets negative from a year or two out as markets anticipate rate hikes followed by falling inflation and rate cuts.

Didn’t know exactly how it would get from here to there, how long it would take or exactly when it would happen.

I never thought the Fed would let it go this far. Especially Governor Kohn, who has been through this before in the 1970s with Burns, Miller, and Volcker. This FOMCs inflation tolerance lasted a lot longer than I expected, even with a weak economy and perceived systemic risk.

Won’t be long before the mainstream comes down hard on this FOMC for letting the inflation cat out of the bag with a high risk, untested, counter theory strategy of aggressively cutting into a triple negative supply shock. The mainstream will see it as a ‘hail Mary’ move. If it works, fine, if not it was a foolish error with a major price to pay to fix it.

Maybe they just got what will turn out to be overconfident in their inflation fighting ability. Kind of a ‘we know how to do that and can do it anytime’ attitude.

Wrong. They will soon find out it is not so easy.

Maybe they got confused and saw the tail risk as that of the gold standard era when there were real supply side constraints to money to deal with.

Also, they probably blamed the whole 1970’s thing on labor unions; so, maybe they got blind sided this time because they thought without unions wages would be ‘well contained’ and therefore there would be no inflation.

Wrong on that score as well. It was about oil before, and it is about oil now.

And the fact is, they have no tools for fighting inflation. They think they do (hiking rates), but higher rates just make it worse by raising costs and jacking up rentier incomes. (Incomes of savers who do not work or produce = more demand and no supply)

The inflation broke in the early 80’s only because of a supply response of about 15 million barrels of crude per day that buried OPEC and caused prices to collapse for almost 20 years. (And even during the 20 years of low oil prices and falling imported prices inflation still averaged around 3%.)

That kind of supply response is not going to happen in the near future. I expect the Saudis to keep hiking and inflation to keep getting worse no matter what the Fed does. It is payback time for them from being humiliated in the 1980s, and they are also at ideological war with us whether we know it or not.

Markets might have a false start or two with the interest rate response and flattening curve, just to not make it too easy.

Also, as before, there could be an equity pullback when it is sensed the Fed is going to seriously fight inflation with hikes designed to keep a sufficient output gap to bring inflation increases down.

And along the way everything goes up, including housing prices, during a major cost push inflation. Even with low demand. Just look at all the weak emerging market nations that have had major inflations with weak demand, high rates, etc. etc.

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Money (USD)

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My take on the USD:

It was at a level based on foreigners wanting to accumulate $70 billion per month which also = the US trade gap (accounting identity).

Most of that desire to accumulate came from foreign CBs trying to support their exporters, oil producers accumulating USD financial assets, and foreign portfolios allocating some percentage of assets to USD assets.

Paulson cut off the CBs calling the currency manipulators and outlaws.

Bush cut off the oil producers by being perceived to be conducting a holy war.

Bernanke scared off the portfolio managers with what looks to them like an ‘inflate your way out of debt’ policy.

And US pension funds are diversifying out of USD into passive commodities and foreign securities.  Looks to me like the desire to accumulate USD overseas is falling towards zero rapidly.

This means they sell us less and buy more of our goods, services, and our real assets.

Volumes’ of non oil imports are falling and of oil imports are flat.

The dollar has gotten low enough for the trade gap to fall from over $70 billion to under $60 billion per month (February was an aberration IMHO).

The dollar will ‘adjust’ until it corresponds with a trade gap that = desired foreign accumulation of USD financial assets.

I see no reason to think the trade gap should not go to zero.

The USD probably has not traded down enough to reflect the zero desire to accumulate USD abroad.

The ECB has serious ideological issues regarding buying of USD.  Not the least of which they don’t want to give the impression that the USD is ‘backing’ the euro, which would be the appearance if they collected USD reserves.

The ECB has an inflation problem, and they believe the strong euro has kept it from being much worse.

The policy ‘shift’ might be the process of ending of US rate cuts at the next meeting by cutting less than expected.

This might first mean only a 25 basis point cut when the market prices in 50 basis points, followed by no cut when markets price in 25 basis points, for example.

This would firm the USD and soften the commodities near term, as after the last 75 basis point cut when markets were pricing 100 basis points.

But this does not change the foreign desires to accumulate USD as direct intervention by the ECB would, for example.

So the adjustment process that gets us to a zero trade gap will continue.

And it will continue to drive up headline CPI with core not far behind.

And US GDP will muddle through in the 0% to +2% range with weak private sector consumption being supported by exports, US government consumption, and moderate investment.

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Market update

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Inflation ripping:
Oil up, grains and commodities up, and dollar down, as continued US demand at higher prices for energy transfers more $US to foreigners who don’t want to accumulate them.

Weakness continues:
Stocks down and credit spreads looking wider, and claims lower but have nonetheless worked their way higher since year end and only rising exports keep GDP at ‘muddling through’ levels.

Interest rates down:
As markets continue to believe Fed won’t even begin to act vs inflation, and will do ‘whatever it takes’ to narrow the output gap to zero, in total contrast to mainstream economic theory.

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Changing dynamics for the Fed

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Cutting 75 basis points rather than the expected 100 basis points gave the Fed positive near term reinforcement from market participants:

  • Dollar went up
  • Food/fuel/commodities went down
  • Stocks did ok, including housing companies
  • Credit did ok

But it’s going to look to the Fed a bit like taking medicine: initial small doses have the desired effect, then things settle back, and it takes ever larger doses to keep moving the needle.

So now crude/food is moving back up, the USD is moving back down, stocks are doing ok, exports are booming, and the fiscal package is about to kick in.

For the Fed to keep moving the needle away from inflation it’s going to keep needing to not give markets all they are anticipating.

So with a 25 cut anticipated, they will realize they need to do no cut for a positive inflation response, and with no cut anticipated they need to hike, etc.

Credit markets will quickly get ahead of this and begin anticipating hikes.

The irony is higher rates will help support demand via the interest income channel.

And higher rates will support price increases via the cost channel.

Demand is being supported by increasing net fed spending and rising exports due to the reduced desires of non-residents to accumulate USD financial assets.

They no longer want to accumulate a net $60 billion a month of US financial assets (negative trade gap) due to the big 4 screaming fire in a crowded theater of previously content patrons:

  1. Paulsen calling CBs that buy USD currency manipulators
  2. Bush making it politically impossible for Muslim nations to further accumulate USD reserves
  3. Bernanke giving inflation a back seat to ‘market functioning’ via deep rate cuts into a triple supply shock
  4. Pension funds diversifying to passive commodity and non US equity strategies
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FOMC

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Karim Basta:

  1. Further cut to gwth outlook
  2. Financial conditions tighter and housing getting worse
  3. Inflation receives greater concern than prior statement
  4. Conclusion: downside risks predominant and ‘timely’ means another intermeeting cut on the table.

Agreed, further comments below:

Release Date: March 18, 2008

For immediate release

The Federal Open Market Committee decided today to lower its target for the federal funds rate 75 basis points to 2-1/4 percent.

Could have been 100 as anticipated by the markets. Fed shaded its cut to the low side of the priced in expectations.

Recent information indicates that the outlook for economic activity has weakened further. Growth in consumer spending has slowed

Implies there is still some growth, not negative yet.

and labor markets have softened.

Looking unrevised February payroll number, not the lower unemployment rate. In January they looked at the higher unemployment rate. Unemployment has subsequently gone from 5.0% to 4.9% to 4.8% (rounded).

Financial markets remain under considerable stress,

They went a long way to relieve stress over the weekend.

and the tightening of credit conditions and the deepening of the housing contraction are likely to weigh on economic growth over the next few quarters.

Housing starts were revised up, and other indicators indicate it may have bottomed.

Inflation has been elevated, and some indicators of inflation expectations have risen.

This was noted in several Fed intermeeting speeches.

The Committee expects inflation to moderate in coming quarters, reflecting a projected leveling-out of energy and other commodity prices and an easing of pressures on resource utilization.

They continue to make this projection even after being completely wrong for many meetings.

Still, uncertainty about the inflation outlook has increased.

That’s why – their forecasts have proven unreliable, and crude/food continues to rise as the USD continues to fall.

It will be necessary to continue to monitor inflation developments carefully.

Only ‘monitor’? No action planned.

Today’s policy action, combined with those taken earlier, including measures to foster market liquidity, should help to promote moderate growth over time and to mitigate the risks to economic activity. However, downside risks to growth remain. The Committee will act in a timely manner as needed to promote sustainable economic growth and price stability.

Intermeeting action is on the table, for both growth and price stability.

Voting for the FOMC monetary policy action were: Ben S. Bernanke, Chairman; Timothy F. Geithner, Vice Chairman; Donald L. Kohn; Randall S. Kroszner; Frederic S. Mishkin; Sandra Pianalto; Gary H. Stern; and Kevin M. Warsh. Voting against were Richard W. Fisher and Charles I. Plosser, who preferred less aggressive action at this meeting.

Wonder how much less aggressive?

In a related action, the Board of Governors unanimously approved a 75-basis-point decrease in the discount rate to 2-1/2 percent. In taking this action, the Board approved the requests submitted by the Boards of Directors of the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston, New York, and San Francisco.

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