Bloomberg：美联储主席Jackson Hole讲话后市场质疑其紧缩可信度

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And as always, on the Bloomberg terminal and the Bloomberg Business app, we begin this hour with stocks little changed as Markets Digest Fed chair Kevin Walsh's Jackson Hole message. Bob Elliot of Unlimited Funds writing, "While the Wash speech was taken as a tad hawkish, it looked more like continued policy and aptitude relying on rhetoric rather than clear action." Bob joins us now for more. Bob, good morning.

Good morning.

Are you looking for a hold in September? Well, I I think the the real question is is is he actually going to follow through on uh the rhetoric that at least he outlined? And and I agree with this basic idea. Maybe he's boxed himself in in terms of uh if you've missed your target for 60 plus months and inflation is above uh what your what your mandate is by a lot and the employment conditions are not so bad. It seems like they should hike and yet there's all of this ambiguity.

You know, the market is looking at this and saying, is this a Fed that's actually credible in delivering the tightening or is this uh as they say out west, all hat and no cattle from the new Fed chairman.

Where do you see the credibility gap in the market right now?

Well, I mean, I think the basic idea is if you look at any sort of simple tailor rule here, you'd expect interest rates on the short end to be up 100 or 200 basis points. I love the fact the Atlanta Fed puts out a whole range of different tailor rule estimates. It's almost like they're trolling those folks in the Equities Building saying, "Hey, look, if you're going to actually deliver monetary policy consistent with what we've talked about that's credible, you've got to be raising rates, you got to be raising it rates quickly."

And yet, we're in this this argument of, you know, is it 4060 that they're going to tighten in September or 6040? The data is unambiguous. It's meaningful hikes relatively quickly and the odds that we get that are dimminimous at this point. And so the real question is when the market is looking at that, they're basically pushing the long end to basically penalize the Fed not doing their job on the short end.

Couldn't this be a great way to kill forward guidance though to say, "Hey market, stop parsing through every single line of my speech to try to get signal for what we are doing. Isn't that a great way to stop that from happening by not hiking in September?"

Sure. I mean, incompetence can be a way to kill forward guidance, right? that that's certainly a way in which they could do it. But the reality is what the Fed needs is to be credible. And when you stand up there and you say we failed at our mandate for 60 plus months and you don't deliver based upon the data, um that that's that's the thing that's actually the credibility is what matters a lot more than the Ford guidance.

And the irony perhaps is the tenure yields were initially moved lower on the speech from uh this chair and ended the day higher. Peter share points to the large amount of IG supply that we're going to be getting from this market. Is the 30-year yield really a read on Fed credibility at this moment?

Well, I think uh I wouldn't necessarily just look at the 30y year yield in terms of Fred Fed credibility. I'd be looking at gold. And I think gold in general is giving us an indication its reaceleration over the course of the last couple weeks is giving some indication that people are really questioning uh not just the Fed but the policym uh institutions across the administration whether it be at the Treasury or at the Fed or in the administration and it's saying you know despite all these efforts to try and keep rates low gold is pushing higher.

Of course, Friday sold off a little bit, but the general trend here is uh for all the effort that the the administration is doing to try and keep rates low, they're basically just flowing money into crypto and gold these days.

Gold up 10% so far this month at one point up 16. We were on course for a monster month. Is the gold trade back on for you?

Oh, for sure. I mean, I think if you look at this whole scope of different of different pressures, whether it be the continued conflict in the Middle East or uh the administration's lack of credibility in policym across a number of different areas, this is setting up an environment where hard assets are outperforming soft assets, right? Where you see gold and oil continuing to be strong, where you see bonds and stocks uh soft in this sort of environment.

And and I think that's the complexion that we're starting to see here. you get that ball rolling a little bit and that could really define what we're seeing in the second half.

Is that another way of expressing a dollar short or is it something different

for sure? Because I think the challenge when you think about the dollar is dollar against what? I mean the dollar against the yen just keeps falling every day. Dollar against the euro, you know, that's a pretty soft economy in and of itself. And so I think investors are starting to move away from trying to express the US dollar and the fiat currency trade across crosses and they're moving more to hard assets. And that's exactly what we're seeing.

What reverses that? Is there anything you see that could stop that trend from what what we're the path that we're witnessing now?

Yeah, sure. A credible 200 basis points of tightening, but it ain't going to happen.

But that doesn't alleviate the geopolitical risk you're talking about about the US weaponizing the US financial system.

Yeah. And and I think um what it would do is it would basically say we're willing to take the pain necessary. We meaning the US economy and developed economies across the world would are willing to take the pain and tighten the belts in response to the geopolitical pressures, the rising inflation pressures that we're seeing, you know, in oil, but we're also seeing it in other commodity areas like copper reaching new highs, etc.

The question is are we going to be are we going to fulfill the mandate of these central banks in the US and Europe and Japan or are we going to uh are we going to keep things easy and not take the pain and allow these inflationary pressures to build globally and that's basically what we're seeing.

Well, one of the interesting things in that speech from Friday was his read on inflation and how he's using it. He brought in two new indicators for us, speed and breath. And I wonder if you with that in hand would look at the inflation data differently and derive something different for this market too. If it's not just what is the headline number, it's what do the components look like and how quickly is it getting back to 2%.

Yeah, I think it's a good example of how um the equivocation in the speech. I think many people sort of looked at it at face value and said uh looks looks hawkish, right? Right. And we saw a bit of that in terms of the market pricing, but the reason why I didn't go further is because Worsh was opening the door to torturing the data to find the path that was necessary so that he didn't necessarily have to hike. You know, if you take a certain number of the components and the uh and the derivative of how those share of components are moving relative to the target, maybe you could figure out a way to try and make a case that we shouldn't have 100 to 200 basis points of tightening.

Everyone in the market knows the reality which is nominal growth in is too high, inflation is too high for the Fed's mandate. And if