Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,
Talk about sheep being led to the slaughter. The S&P 500 is up 11% from its February 11th intra-day low (1812) because Wall Street still has inventory to unload. That much is par for the course.
One reason given for the contention that investors should fade Draghi’s latest “package” is that, to quote Deutsche Bank, “we are one hawkish Fed statement away from a re-pricing.”
The argument is essentially this: the Fed reminds the market that more rate hikes are still in the cards (even if there isn’t one today), that leads to dollar strength, which in turn triggers a renewed downturn in commodities and thus a return to the same dynamics that waylaid markets earlier this year.
Here’s how Goldman put it last week:
Coming at the same time as an inflationary report which showed Core CPI rising at 2.30%, or the highest rate since October 2008, and one which will put further pressure on the Fed to hike rates as shelter inflation is now simply too big to sweep under the rug, we also got February's housing starts and permits, which while painting a mixed picture of the US housing market suggested further strength in the US housing sector in the past month.
For the past four years, bond traders have quickly turned their focus after Federal Reserve meetings to something called the dot plot (seen as a key insight into their collective thinking on rates). The problem is, as Bloomberg exposes, the forecasts weren't very good... and fund managers are increasingly ignoring the dot plot for investment decisions, as one strategist exclaimed "we don’t put a lot of credibility in the dots, [officials] have usually been cheerleaders for the economy, and they get turning points in the economy wrong."
Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
“Prosperity is like a Jenga tower. Take one piece out and the whole thing can fall.”
That’s a direct quote from John Williams, the President of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank in a speech he gave a few weeks ago.
He could have just as easily been talking about propaganda. The Fed, the White House, Wall Street, the media have a vested interest in peddling a certain narrative about the economy.