Quickly on Powell Rates backed up after Chair Powell’s speech. In particular, in the Q&A he indicated that the revisions to GDI increased his confidence that the economy remained on

Monday Morning Notes, 9/30/24 If You Don’t Have Time This Morning This is a holding period while market participants await fresh direction from the data. Fed Chair Jerome Powell broke

Monday Morning Notes, 9/23/24 We have a shorter than usual Monday note as we process the events of the past two months.  Market participants currently anticipate a federal funds rate of

Fed Attempts to Lead With a “Hawkish 50” We have travelled a long road with a lot of twists and turns since we called for a 50bp rate cut in

Monday Morning Notes, 9/16/24 The Fed will most likely kick off this easing cycle with a 50bp cut this week. We are foregoing our usual format for a deeper dive

We Need To Be Nimble While we couldn’t ignore the pre-blackout messaging, we were hesitant to underweight the odds of a 50bp cut next week. Despite complacency about the labor market

Quick Updates The NFIB Small Business Actual Earnings Change index plunged in August: This result is consistent with the Beige Book story that activity took a turn for the worse

Monday Morning Notes, 9/9/24 If You Don’t Have Time This Morning Fed speakers gave little indication that they were leaning toward a 50bp rate cut at the September meeting. Instead,

The Waiting is the Hard Part Tomorrow is a critical day for market participants. The Fed prefers that market participants are nearly certain of the Fed’s intended course of action ahead

Crossing the Line At the risk of sounding repetitive, we think it’s important to go into the rest of this week remembering that Fed Chair Jerome Powell drew a line

Tuesday Morning Notes, 9/3/24 If You Don’t Have Time This Morning At this year’s Jackson Hole conference, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell drew a line in the sand. By the

Data Updates Some quick updates on data we are tracking and the implications for policy.  First, although the Conference Board confidence measure edged up, the labor differential fell in August:

Monday Morning Notes, 8/26/24 If You Don’t Have Time This Morning Fed Chair Jerome Powell appears to agree with our assessment of the July employment report. Even if the August

BLS Revisions, FOMC Minutes The preliminary revisions to nonfarm payrolls revealed that government and education/health care employment drove almost all the job growth in the year ending in March 2024. The

Odds and Ends Quick updates and some items that haven’t made their way into a note. Bostic raises concerns about the labor market We aren’t sure we have ever seen

Monday Morning Notes, 8/19/24 If You Don’t Have Time This Morning The Fed argues that it is not data point dependent, but instead is data dependent. Still, any given data

Monday Morning Notes, 8/12/24 Given limited data last week, we forego the usual Monday morning format. The size of upcoming rate cuts depends on how quickly the Fed seeks to

Quick Note on Unemployment The focus on the Sahm Rule and whether the US is in recession misses the bigger picture told by the data. The bigger picture is that

Monday Morning Notes, 8/5/24 If You Don’t Have Time This Morning Markets moved aggressively on weakening employment numbers on Friday. But they were just following an outlined reaction function. Neither the

Quick Update Markets have been volatile as traders unwind leveraged trades. At one point today, markets were pricing a 60% chance of an intermeeting rate cut by the Fed although