Gita Gopinath：美联储无需急于加息，AI基建推高长期利率

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either we've got the old Fed or a new Fed. Either that guidance from them matters or it doesn't.

Yeah. If this is a new Fed, though, think about how disruptive that would be to this market given how mispriced people are to the idea of uh the chance of some sort of Fed rate hike today.

Let's build on this conversation. and the former IMF deputy managing director and global economics lab founding director Gita Gopernath joins us now for more Gita welcome to the program we've been looking forward to catching up with you does this Fed have the luxury of skipping this meeting

I think it does I think uh you know there is still tremendous uncertainty about the outlook you know they could have done a hike but given where we are right now in terms of market expectations I don't expect that they're going to have a huge disruptive announcement uh today. So there's December. December is where everybody expects there's going to be a 25 bips hike. It's okay. I think it doesn't one 25 bits delay for a couple of months doesn't make that big a difference to uh financing conditions or to tightening monetary conditions.

So I think it's okay.

Do you think though that the uncertainty premium that's been injected into the market over the lack of an understanding of the reaction function has been a very expensive policy at the very least? a mistake at worst given the fact that the market doesn't have a sense of where Kevin Worsh's ballast really is. What is Northstar is to decide whether to hike or to hold. What Worsh is trying to do is move away from a forward guidance approach which puts all of them in a straight jacket and that was the case for a few years in you know a few years ago.

He wants to move away from that. So any such transition is going to generate some increase in uncertainty. So I think we can give him that. I don't think it's a huge increase in uh premium associated with that uncertainty and that will go away with more and more of these conferences and these conversations that are had. I think the bottom line is that the Fed has is working under a lot of uncertainty. What's going to happen to energy prices?

It's it's still very troubling at this moment. It could go down though relatively rapidly. financial conditions are still actually highly accommodative. You know, maybe some of the high yields have gone up but mostly generally accommodative financial conditions but again with every news we hearing questions about you know could we have this AI bubble burst is that could we have a big change? I think there's too much of uncertainty to provide uh clear forward guidance at this moment.

You've talked about this bubble in financing for AI and you did worry that it was a bubble and if it did uh blow up that it would end up creating a real financial crisis of sorts. What do you think the Fed's role in this should be? Should they be tightening financial conditions to restrict some of the financing that's uh being done right now? Yeah, when I wrote that piece, you know, I guess it was a year ago, my estimate was that the hit would be about 35 trillion to global wealth if there was a com correction.

Right now, that number is 41 trillion. So, it's it's going up. This is there's continues to be a lot of enthusiasm in putting money in US equity markets even though there's, you know, some more caution building up around that. In terms of what the Fed should do, Fed should certainly not go out there specifically to burst a bubble. I mean, that would be a terrible idea. They're going to have to look at the conditions that they that matter for inflation, whether they're actually seeing that their inflation target is moving for, you know, that the actual inflation is staying well above their inflation target for too long.

That would be their bigger concern. You don't want to go out there certainly and try and spook markets and and burst the bubble. That's certainly not something you want to do. Ga, what's your reaction to the sequencing of things that the Fed chair has articulated that the first move is a demand shock and the second move might be some supply relief. How are you thinking about that? It certainly is the case that what we're seeing right now is a demand shock from AI.

The supply relief, I mean it's we're not seeing anything right now. I would think the expectations that it'll show up over time. But if you just look between now and the next 2 three years, the amount of buildout in AI infrastructure is just huge. I mean, so if you just compare to, for example, what the US government is putting out in terms of its borrowing needs, that's about $2 trillion a year. The amount of buildout that's we're expecting over the next year is over a trillion and a half.

So these two are really very very large numbers which is why more generally interest rates are uh are moving up. So this is very big I would say demand effect that's coming if this continues the way it does and I don't [clears throat] you know there's fair bit of uncertainty. I think there are two scenarios to prepare for if you're a fed chair at this time. There's one scenario which is the baseline which is we continue this way.

We have the pressure that's coming from demand. we have the inflationary effects of AI buildout energy and so on and you know you follow the policy that you follow now but there's also a possibility that you could have a serious market correction in which case you would be in the mold of cutting interest rates very rapidly so there is though that's a lesser likely scenario but that's absolutely not trivial at this point I think to keep on the table

well let's deal with the baseline do you see a path back to 2% without containing the buildout that's happening right now from major tech companies If you really want to push the inflation rate very quickly back to 2% then you would be I think we would be in a much tighter hiking mode at this moment. We're not going to do that and I don't think that's the right thing to do. So inflation is hovering around 3%. It's not drifting further up.

That's important and that should give some confidence but and so you take the time to try and bring it down to 2% but I don't think there's a big rush to make that happen. Um, it's going to be slow. My sense is that if inflation settles at like two and a half%, it's okay. It's not 2%. Yes, I know War says that we are it's just a 2% target, but hey, if it hovers around 2 and a half%, you know, you would take that.

If there was a serious correction, how much room does the Fed have to cut rates? And how much ability does the US have to issue more debt in order to help its economy given what we've seen in places like France? Given how much of US economic growth seems to be hinged to the AI trade. I mean the Fed can cut interest rates very quickly. That absolutely they can do that. So that brings the short end down. The question is what happens to the long end of the eel curve and I think that is the question mark.

My personal view is that it's still the case that we will see long-term yields go down. Maybe not as much as has happened in the past because of all these sources of demand for capital including from the government and the large fiscal situation and also the potential risk of inflation which I think is much more salient these days than it was in the past. I expect the long yield will come down. But it is true the two things that have changed since yo