美联储主席沃什上任近三月：沟通风格引发市场困惑

[music] Bloomberg Audio Studios podcasts, radio, news. [music] I'm Stephanie Flanders, head of government and economics at Bloomberg, and this is Trumpomics, the podcast that looks at pretty much everything in the economic world of Donald Trump. And in that world, the US central bank looms pretty large. And now, Donald Trump's handpicked Fed chair, Kevin Walsh, has been in the job nearly 3 months. I thought it was worth taking stock of his tenure so far.

We're recording this on Wednesday morning, US time, so we also have just had a new US inflation number that could make his job slightly easier. One big headline about Kevin Walsh's time at the helm so far. He's been his own man despite all the politics around his selection. He's not actively been trying to persuade his fellow governors to cut interest rates as Donald Trump had urged so often. And although the president says they've spoken, Walsh doesn't appear to be taking regular cues from the White House.

We should probably also note that he's not made any clear gaffs. Most incoming Fed chairs have had a misstep or two in their first few weeks. they've been caught thinking aloud in an interview or said a bit too much at a press conference. Well, that's not Chair Walsh. In fact, he's not been saying very much at all about anything and that is a big change for the financial markets after years in which policy makers have become used to offering a lot of guidance and transparency around their decision-m.

It's left a lot of people inside and outside the financial markets unhappy and confused. Now, you could say investors could just grow up and learn to live with less spoon feeding. But for some, including Bloomberg opinion columnist and former New York Federal Reserve President Bill Dudley, the issue runs deeper than a change of coms. And I'm glad to say he's with us on Trumpomics to explain. Bill, thank you very much.

Yes, I'm delighted to be here. Now, it's quite difficult these days to find wholehearted supporters of the approach Kevin Walsh has taken, but Robin Brooks is one who thinks the world has maybe been a bit too tough on him. And you'll remember he was on the show a while back. He's now a blogger, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, former chief economist for the Institute for International Finance, and chief FX strategist [music] at Goldman Sachs.

Robin, thanks for coming back.

Thanks for having me. We are speaking just an hour or so after the CPI consumer price index number has come out for the US. And so I guess we should spend a couple of minutes on that given that it looms quite large in a lot of this decision making. We saw the core inflation number at 2.5% annual rate. That's the lowest in more than 5 years. The headline rate 3.4% fair bit higher as it has been for a while. Bill, just briefly on this, how do you think it changes the outlook if at all for the next few months to have this number?

It wasn't a big surprise, it has to be said.

I think it doesn't change it very much. I think the Fed was on hold at the last meeting because they thought the inflation data was going to be more benign. It has been more benign. So all the arguments for staying on hold that you had at the last meeting are still in place. And that's why the market reduced its probability of tightening in September from about 60% to about 45%. But there's a long way to go to the next meeting.

I think fundamentally the arguments for tightening are are still pretty strong. What the arguments I would make is number one, it doesn't look like monetary policy is actually restrictive. We've been at this interest rate or higher for 2 years and we're still operating at full employment. Number two, we're missing more on the inflation mandate than we are on the employment mandate. in terms of which side you want to care about.

You'd care more about the inflation side and especially in the fact that we missed the inflation objective for 5 years in a row. And then lastly, the risk of of error here I think is asymmetric as well. If you tighten it, it turns out to be unnecessary. You can obviously easily reverse it. If you don't tighten and you should have tightened, then you have a risk of inflation expectations becoming unanchored. And you have to believe that the real risk given that the Fed has missed for five years in a row.

We hear that argument a lot although not not so much from from Kevin Walsh Robin just on this July inflation number.

So I would say that I came into this number with a fairly strong view that we don't even though we've had many years of various supply shocks and of course they just keep coming. We don't really have a picture where inflation is broadening out. I regularly put out in my substack data on inflation generalization. So things that measure the combined weight of items in the CPI and the PCE that are above 2% and those things have been trending down for a couple of years.

So I came into this print constructively. If you look at the guts of this print, then I totally agree with Bill. The guts are quite benign. In particular, if you look at what I sort of think of as core core, so when you strip out the noisy elements of core inflation, because core does contain non-market stuff like OEER, administered prices, when you strip that stuff out, basically we had an inflation reading that was flat after a slightly negative reading a month ago.

So my views on monetary policy here have been heavily predicated on what's going on with inflation and I just don't think from my perspective this is a print that screams for tightening.

I think that's where it leaves us and both of you are in a slightly different place but I think we're at least saying there's more question marks around an interest rate rise in September and I think that's kind of broadly reflected in the market pricing book. Obviously, we're in a quite different place than we might have been 6 months ago when there was was much more of a live discussion around cutting interest rates.

Even in the discussion we've just had, you've said a great deal more than Kevin Walsh has been willing to say [laughter] about the underlying dynamics for inflation or what might drive policy going forward. So, Bill, explain why you think that lack of lack of communications is a problem.

So, I have no problem with getting rid of forward guidance. I think forward guidance about talking about what you're going to do next is a bad idea because basically it can constrain you from changing policy when new information comes along that suggests that a change is warranted and it can sort of lock you in.

We kind of got in the habit of doing that after the global financial crisis. It was sort of somewhat controversial but then a lot of central banks ended up having once you start doing it it's has been quite hard for central banks to step back from it.

Yeah. You could argue that the Fed's policy going through the COVID pandemic was the fact that they were sort of locked in with all these conditions about what would have to happen before they would actually raise rates. If you remember, they couldn't raise rates until we were at full employment, until inflation was at 2% and we thought inflation was going to be above 2% in the future. So in March of 22, um inflation was really high and the federal funds rate was at zero.

So that was example of four guidance of really boxing you in. So I think most economists I think are agree with the predicate that forward guidance is is too constraining. But we can't conflate forward guidance with providing information about the Fed's monetary policy reaction function. In other words, how does the Fed think about monetary policy? How does the Fed think how monetary policies affects aggregate demand and inflation?

And Kevin W has been very reluctant to provide any information about how he's thinking about the economy and what the implications of that are for monetary policy. And I think that's a