“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.” (more…)
The first quarter of 2014 offered up all the excitement and chills of a thriller. First, stock markets careened like runaway mining cars during January. Next, in her first press conference as new Federal Reserve Chairwoman, Janet Yellen implied the Fed might tighten monetary policy sooner than anyone expected which unsettled markets. Finally, Russia annexed Ukraine’s CrimeanPeninsula, incurring sanctions from other countries, and tipping its economy further toward recession. As in many thrillers, after some devastation (Russia’s stock market lost billions as capital fled the country), the quarter ended on a more encouraging note with many of the world’s stock markets in positive territory. (more…)
Was it a stutter step or have markets lost their balance?
Anybody who knows football can tell you a lot goes into every play. Strategy, practice, game review, and preparation all affect outcomes, as do decisions and execution during games. Many, many factors influence gains and losses on the field. Similarly, numerous issues affect the performance of stock and bond markets – a fact that became abundantly clear when pundits tried to explain last week’s market downturn. (more…)
Exceptional… exceeds expectations… meets expectations… needs improvement… unsatisfactory. It’s a rating system familiar to anyone who has ever received a performance review. Right now, the performance of inflation is not meeting expectations – and that may be a good thing.
Contrarians probably are waiting for the other shoe – or in this case, U.S. stock markets – to drop.
If you’re not familiar with contrarian investing, the theory goes something like this: Consensus opinion is often wrong. When the majority of investors have a bullish outlook and believe stocks are going to move higher, the chances are stock values will drop. Likewise, when the majority has a bearish outlook and believes stocks are going to move lower, the chances are stock values will rise.
“So much depends upon, a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater, beside the white chickens.”
Well, the U.S. Federal Reserve’s monetary policy is a lot more complex than the simple tools mentioned in the oft-memorised William Carlos Williams’ poem, The Red Wheelbarrow, but an awful lot is depending on it. In some of those countries that have been affected negatively by changing expectations about quantitative easing, the importance of chickens, wheelbarrows, and other basic tools to a family’s economic well-being has not been forgotten.
But that doesn’t appear to be the case when it comes to Federal Reserve monetary policy. For some time, the Fed has been communicating its intention to gradually cut back its bond purchasing program (a.k.a. quantitative easing) while keeping the target fed funds rate steady. The target fed funds rate is the interest rate at which banks borrow money from each other overnight. The Fed has not taken action yet, but its words have caused nominal bond yields to rise and inflation expectations to fall. Typically, these changes are associated with tightening monetary policy.
