It's confusing to be a Goldman client these days.
One month after the investment bank reported that its Bear Market Risk indicator had jumped to 67%, a level it hit most recently before the dot com bubble crash and just before the global financial crisis and prompted Goldman to ask "should we be worried now"...
Authored by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,
Who President Trump ultimately picks as the next Federal Reserve Chairman doesn’t really matter. Unless he goes really far afield to someone totally unexpected, whoever that person will be will be largely more of the same. It won’t be a categorical change, a different philosophical direction that is badly needed.
Last weekend, as Deutsche Bank's derivatives strategist Aleksandar Kocic was looking at the spread between the short and long end of the curve, and while contemplating the lack of market volatility, he concluded that "given where long rates are, Fed appears as overly hawkish – it has only two more hikes to go and, for volatility and risk premia to reprice higher, the gap has to widen. As is appears unlikely that the Fed will be cutting rates any time soon, the gap could widen only if the Long rates sell off."
Last weekend, One River's CIO Eric Peters explained what he thought would be the nightmare scenario for the next Fed chair, who as we now know will either be Jerome Powell or John Taylor, or both (with an outside chance of Yellen remaining in her post). According to the hedge fund CIO, the "worst case scenario" is one in which despite an improving economy, yields simply refuse to go up, leading to the final asset bubble and Fed intervention that "pops" it:
The farce is now complete.
What is the best way to run schizophrenic monetary policy in a schizophrenic country, where the Fed sees "mysterious" deflation everywhere even as most ordinary consumers can't afford to pay their health insurance, resulting in Fed chair candidates ranging from the extremely hawkish end to the dovish one? Simple: if you are Donald Trump, you bring both of them in.