Business

Last week, we presented readers with the latest note from SocGen strategist. Albert Edwards, who explained why after so many years of false rate hike starts, the market not only responded to last week's hike in a dovish manner - interpreting last Wednesday's 0.25% hike as a 0.25% rate cut- but as Goldman Sachs showed previously, the dovish reaction was one of the strongest ones since the financial crisis, in other words: "the market no longer believes the Fed." This is what Edwards said, citing his FX colleague Kit Juckes:

By Shant Movsesian and Raj Dhall MSTA,

This week has not been one to savor for USD bulls, with the FOMC rate hike accompanied by a statement which failed to generate the fresh wave of hawkish sentiment markets had positioned for. We saw some hesitancy ahead of the Fed announcement Wednesday evening, with Fed chair Yellen’s familiar cautiousness reining in UST yields to a modest degree. The subsequent pull back has also been relatively modest with the 2yr shedding 5bps on the week as a whole; both 5yr and 10yr off the highs by some 10bps.

Last weekend, after looking at the latest H.8 statement by the Fed, we noted something concerning: total loans and leases by U.S. commercial banks were rising at an annual pace of about 4.6%, based on weekly Fed data. That is down from a 6.4% pace for all of last year and peak rates of around 8% in mid-2016. This is the slowest pace of debt creation since the spring of 2014. This deceleration has prompted numerous questions about the sustainability of the recovery, and led the WSJ to noted that the slowdown, "is at odds with the idea of a stronger economy and rising sentiment."

Authored by David Stockman via The Daily Reckoning,

During the last 129 months, the Fed has held 86 meetings. On 83 of those occasions it either cut rates or left them unchanged.

So you can perhaps understand why Wednesday’s completely expected (for the last three weeks!) 25 bips left the day traders nonplussed. The Dow rallied over 100 points that day.

Traders understandably believe that this monetary farce can continue indefinitely, and that our Keynesian school marm’s post-meeting presser was evidence that the Fed is still their friend.

We won’t bore you with yet another article about the recent rate hike by the Federal Reserve. This move was widely expected, as the Fed members had been hinting this would happen for several months now. Additionally, the new ‘hints’ about an additional two rate hikes later this year also didn’t surprise the market as we believe this was already priced in. The slight hike in the Federal Funds Rate estimate for 2019 to 3% (from 2.9%) didn’t see to worry the markets as the indices were all sent higher on the back of the FOMC meeting.