US Federal Reserve

Submitted by Mark St. Cyr

What’s The Frequency Janet?

Once again, in spectacular fashion, the financial “markets” have miraculously rebounded from the aptly moniker’d “Bullard Bottom” and without pause has traversed in a near vertical assent to recapture the levels where all the uncertainties began. In other words, after all the gyrations over the last 14+ months we are once again only back to the levels (as scored by the U.S. financial markets e.g., Dow, S&P, et al) where the Fed stood confidently in their economic policy acumen.

Anyone having listened, and traded according to the recommendations of Goldman chief FX strategist Robin Brooks in the past 4 months, is most likely broke.  First it was his call to go very short the EURUSD ahead of the December ECB meeting, which however led to the biggest EURUSD surge since the announcement of QE1.  Then, two weeks ago, ahead of the ECB meeting he "doubled down" on calls to short the EUR ahead of the ECB, the result again was a EUR super surge, the biggest since December.

One of the more surprising market developments of 2016 has been the violent obliteration of those who had taken part in the biggest consensus trade of 2015, namely long the USD. As the Fed finally admitted earlier this week, the US economy is sputtering and is woefully incapable of handling 4 rate hikes, or 3 for that matter.

Bangladesh has learned a valuable lesson over the past two months: Do. Not. Trust. The. New. York. Fed.

On a quiet Friday morning in early February, a series of instructions using authenticated SWIFT codes was sent to 33 Liberty allegedly from the Bangladesh central bank requesting the transfer of nearly $1 billion from the country’s FX reserves.

“The dollar rally is far from over,” Goldman’s Robin Brooks said, just hours before this week’s FOMC announcement.

“We expect the Fed to signal that it wants to continue normalizing policy, which means three hikes this year and four in 2017,” Brooks continued. “Overall, our sense is that the outcome will be more hawkish than market pricing.”