- We have to talk to people and find out where things are going
- We can live with recent inflation data, Fed should be patient on policy
- People are feeling alright
- I’m still feeling good about getting back to 2% inflation
- There will be an ‘art’ to deciding when to cut
- We will get to a point where the full range of data allows us to cut
- I like to look at the Dallas Fed’s trimmed mean, it’s been at 2.6% for months now
- My belief is that it will be time to start normalizing in the summer. If there’s more progress, I would be willing to move that forward
- I was at two rate cuts in the dot plot but I could move three “for sure”
- There’s evidence that productivity of US workers has improved
- Economy still has tremendous momentum
- Bankers telling him that customer balances are ‘about 50%’ compared to 100% during the pandemic
- Business leaders feel like they’ve gotten through the worst of the storm and they’re in a good place
- We need to make sure the economy is moving in the right direction
- Wage growth is continuing its downward trend to normalization
- if the economy performs well, I’m ok waiting to cut
The last comment is the dictionary definition of the ‘Fed put’.
“If you look at the dispersion of prices, almost one-third of the PCE basket has price increases over five per-cent. That’s 50 per-cent higher than what you would see ordinarily. So when you have lots of products that are showing lots of high price changes, it’s hard to think you’re there yet [on confidence to cut rates].”
This article was written by Adam Button at www.forexlive.com. Source