Weekly Insights
Weekly Webcasts
Join us every Monday for expert market commentary and analysis. Our weekly webcasts cover key market developments, economic indicators, and investment strategies.
Hard Luck For Hard Landers
The economy has proven resilient, defying all the reasons it shouldn’t be, to which diehard hard landers still cling. We expect that it will remain resilient and that inflation will continue to fall to the Fed’s target (a.k.a. “immaculate disinflation”). In this scenario, the Fed won’t be rushing to ease and won’t ease by much. The Fed’s policy stance is perhaps better cast as “normalizing” than tightening that requires undoing. Labor market supply and demand are coming into better balance, as the Fed would like, though November employment data attest to the labor market’s continued strength
Ho! Ho! Ho!
The stock market’s Santa Claus rally has been turbocharged by a rallying bond market, subsiding inflation, lower oil and gasoline prices—in turn fueling consumers’ purchasing power—diminished fear of the Fed, and China’s economic weakness, which lowers the prices Americans pay for goods imported from there. … Jamie Dimon is right to warn that geopolitical dangers are great, but we don’t ascribe to his view that inflation remains troublesome, the Fed might tighten more, and the consumer’s strength likely isn’t sustainable. We think the economic evidence suggest otherwise on each score. … More good news: The sticky services inflation rates that have concerned the Fed are coming unstuck.