It’s Christmas, and Mrs. Fedwatch isn’t really keen on me typing away on the computer. Hence, I will need to keep this brief and to the point, at least as much as I can. With that in mind:

Fed ends the year with a questionable rate hike. The Fed acted as expected and hiked rates last week. The data drove the decision; even with growth slowing, the pace of activity is expected to remain above the rate of potential growth, stoking inflationary pressures. In simple terms, the economy retains too much momentum heading into the economy for the Fed to hold back from pushing closer to their estimate of neutral.

What makes the hike questionable (in my opinion, an error) was that it felt like a model-driven decision much like the December 2015 hike. Both occurred despite market turmoil that had continued too long to be ignored. And both occurred in the context of low inflation. There was no pressing reason for a rate hike other than they insist on defining policy on the back of long-run forecasts and feel compelled to follow-through with that policy.

That said, if the hike was an error, it was a recoverable error. I think the Fed will follow the 2016 script and step off the stage for at least the first half of the year if not longer. They now have the yield curve flat as a pancake; continuing to hike rates threatens to invite an outright inversion. Why tempt fate when you can sit back and wait for the lagged impact of rate hikes to make itself evident? They can stop now, stand ready to ease if necessary, and still keep the expansion alive. There is simply nothing in the data that says a recession is right on top of us.

Trump’s war with the Fed was inevitable. We all knew how the Fed would react to a fiscal stimulus shock. A monetary offset was always coming down the pipeline. The Fed never fully embraced the story that tax cuts would induce a supply-side response (a story that looks at odds with the decline in very long-term bond yield back down to 3%), something very clear in the Fed’s forecasts. That monetary offset was destined to anger President Trump.

The Fed isn’t the only thing weighing on markets. I don’t think the Fed is helping with the December rate hike while the forecasts of an intention to tighten policy into the restrictive range only adds insult to injury. That said, equities prices are under stress from a variety of directions: The expected fading of fiscal stimulus (including losing the impact on profits from tax cuts last year), expected slowing growth, tighter profit margins due to tariffs and labor costs, external political factors (Brexit), the US government slowdown, and general Trumpian uncertainty about almost every aspect of US policy. FWIW, it’s reasonable to argue that a bear market without a recession is a buying opportunity.

Trump’s ire with Powell creates a dangerous situation. Trump has reportedly discussed firing Powell as well as Mnuchin, who he blames for hiring Powell in the first place. Even aside from central bank independence issues, it is obviously bad precedent for the President to fire his economic team at the first hint of trouble. What does this say about the reaction of the President to a recession or a real financial crisis? What does this say about the ability of the government to manage the economy in such an event? Nothing good – it says that Trump stands ready to let it all burn down unintentionally because he does not understand policy. It is unquestionably now a real risk for market participants.

I feel we need to place nontrivial odds on the possibility that Trump fires, or at least attempts to fire, Powell. Mnuchin too. Yes, Trump did say nice things about both Powell and Mnuchin on Christmas day. How long is that good will going to last if markets keep slipping? A day? And note Trump’smodus operandi.Threaten to fire repeatedly, say nice things after the news leaks of the threatened firing, and then fire by tweet. Trump never accepts fault for anything, if there is a problem it is always caused by someone else, and that someone needs to be fired. Needless to say, firing Powell would rattle markets.

We don’t know how the Fed would react to an effort by Trump to fire Powell. There is a widely held belief that the President can’t “fire” Powell; at most he can demote Powell from Chairman back to governor. But then Powell’s colleagues could just vote to retain Powell in his role as head of the policy making FOMC. Trump would go ballistic of course and want Powell gone. The Fed could send the whole issue to the courts to be sorted out and, in theory, should they be victorious, enhance the Fed’s independence. But it would come at the cost of protracted uncertainty as the court battle rages.

Trump’s war on the Fed is already damaging the Fed. The Fed will deny vociferously that politics plays any roles in its policy making decisions. That said, central bankers are humans and it seems unlikely to me that they can truly make decisions that are not impacted in some way, even if just subconsciously, by politics. We will never know if Trump prodded the Fed into last week’s rate hike subconsciously; pushing back on Trump would be at least icing on the cake. And if the Fed is forced to cut rates going in the months ahead, they will be accused of caving to Trump even if the data or a Trump-induced market meltdown drives the decision.

Trump is placing the Fed in a no-win situation. I understand that my belief that the Fed has substantial exposure here is someone controversial. I don’t think the Fed can escape the Trump years unscathed. When I say this, the response is that Trump can’t fire the Chair or that he can’t influence the voting FOMC members or that the Chair can just make nice with the Senate.

First, I don’t think Trump cares that he “can’t” fire the Fed Chair. In Trump-world, he hired Powell and can fire Powell. Second, the Senate hasn’t shown much backbone when it comes to standing up to Trump. Third, what wasn’t entirely expected is that Trump can make the Fed do his bidding by creating a crisis that forces a Fed response. Exerting Fed independence in such a situation only puts the economy at risk. Heads they win, tails you lose.

Bottom Line: I not naturally prone to hyperbole, but this whole episode has a distinctly emerging market feel. I of course could be wrong here, but I don’t think that Trump-induced volatility is going to end anytime soon. It will arguably only get worse when a Democratic House of Representatives starts issuing subpoenas. We appear to be caught in a doom loop at the moment with each drop in the stock market bringing about a Trump response that induces another drop in the market. That can’t happen forever of course, but it is not clear that anyone wants to catch the falling knife just yet. We don’t know how long Wall Street can remain under pressure before it bleeds over into Main Street. The Fed can’t stand back and watch that happen; ultimately, they will need to cushion Trumpian uncertainty.

Related reading:

Trump Has Likely Done Lasting Damage to the Fed

The Fed Needs a Little Push From the Data for a Pause

The Federal Reserve hiked rates as expected at December’s meeting while delivering a more hawkish message than Wall Street was hoping for. Equities tumbled and the yield curve flattened further as Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s press conference wore on. I can’t imagine that the Fed is pleased with this outcome. That said, they have only themselves to blame. The Summary of Economic projections continues to maintain an unnecessarily hawkish bias that only allows Wall Street’s worries about growth to fester.

In retrospect, the outcome of this meeting is largely what would have been expected if you focused more heavily on the data flow than on the turmoil in financial markets. The Fed delivered largely according to my expectations, with a key exception: The Fed was more hawkish than I anticipated in that they did not drop entirely the “further gradual increases” language in the FOMC’s statement. I had expected them to create more uncertainty about the future; they chose instead to reinforce their expectation that rates would continue to rise.

Arguably, they were forced by their own forecasts to retain the language. To be sure, the revisions to the Fed’s forecasts were dovish in many ways. Expectations for growth, inflation, longer-run unemployment, and longer-run interest rates were all revised lower. But these dovish shifts failed to offset the fundamentally hawkish aspect of the forecasts: The forecasts continue to say that central bankers anticipate they will continue to raise rates until the Fed turns policy from accommodative to restrictive. It’s not just the median; the pattern of dots imply the same.

What’s going on here? The Fed is currently a slave to its own models. In simplistic terms, those models will revert in a predictable fashion to whatever supply side conditions are chosen by policymakers. Growth will slow toward trend and unemployment rise to its natural rate as policy rates rise into restrictive territory. It’s all a straightforward mechanical exercise.

That exercise, however, implies far too much certainty about the path of interest rates. That path is only valid in one particular future, but many futures are possible. Consequently, in the presser Powell tried to downplay the dots. This though is really almost impossible to do because no matter how you spin it the dots tell a clear story about the Fed’s expectations, and those expectations amount to a hawkish policy bias, and that’s a message Wall Street doesn’t want to hear.

I would say that Powell made the situation worse with this in the preamble to the presser:

The Federal Reserve faces a most uncomfortable confluence of events as central bankers begin their two-day meeting to ponder the path of rate policy. In a nutshell, equities continued to struggle in the midst of fairly solid data as President Trump complains yet again about rate hikes while stoking the uncertainty that appears at least partly if not mostly to blame for the volatile equity markets. Yes, I know, it’s a lot to follow. Hopefully I can break it down into more manageable pieces.

Begin with the easy part. Recent data remain largely consistent with the Fed’s outlook. As a reminder, the Fed’s forecast anticipates the growth will ease in 2019 relative to this year but remain at a pace that would continue to intensify inflationary pressures. In short then the Fed expects growth to slow on the back of past rate hikes and waning fiscal stimulus. I don’t think the Fed will view incoming data as inconsistent with that outlook. Industrial production continues to gain:

Households continue to spend at a healthy rate:

Even initial jobless claims, the boogeyman of the bears, tumbled sharply by 27k to just 206k, pulling the four-week moving average lower:

And core-inflation firmed:

In response to the data, the Atlanta Fed now estimates fourth quarter growth is tracking at a 3% pace. All told, outside of the downdraft in equities and related financial tightening, I don’t think there is much here to induce large shifts in the Fed’s forecasts for 2019. Those forecasts were as of September hawkish in the sense that they predicted further rate hikes.

We have a fairly good idea of the Fed’s reaction function as it pertains to the employment and inflation. If we review the incoming data and keep our eyes on that ball, the case remains to continue edging up policy rates into the neutral range and then turn increasingly data dependent. By that measure then the case for a rate hike on Wednesday appears fairly straightforward.

The Fed though has an implicit financial stability metric. Because they have never made it explicit though, we don’t know how it might apply in the current situation. The Fed doesn’t like to move on market moves alone. That said, with equity markets tumbling to 14-months lows, it seems easy to make the case that the Fed should opt to simply skip this month and come back to the table in January. Stopping short of the lower estimates of neutral when the economy continues to perform as expected would be a bitter pill for some FOMC members to sallow. But equity prices are data too, and the Fed is data dependent. Hence this becomes the risk to the rate hike call.

President Trump’s latest tweet highlights another aspect of this policy decision. Trump again implored the Fed to stop raising rates, tweeting “It is incredible that with a very strong dollar and virtually no inflation, the outside world blowing up around us, Paris is burning and China way down, the Fed is even considering yet another interest rate hike.”

There are actually two problems here for the Fed. First is that skipping on the rate hike in light of the data and their forecasts could appear to be caving to the President’s demands. As noted earlier though, they could delay on the basis of the equity sell off, but that has its own problem of the appearance of a Powell put on the stock market rather than a Powell put on the economy.

The second problem is that one factor driving the uncertainty on Wall Street is Trump himself. If the “outside world is blowing up” and “China way down,” these events are the direct results of Trump’s policy of weaponized uncertainty. Anywhere you turn, there is a potential crisis attributable to Trump’s chaotic policy approach. Trade wars and the related potential to disrupt global supply chains. The threat to shut down the government over a border wall that is not getting funded. And next year promises to see an increase in the chaos Trump will likely want to deflect attention as a Democratic House of Representatives promises to bring even more investigations into Trump and his family.

In a sense, Trump’s weaponized uncertainty drives down equity prices which in turn induces the Fed to do what Trump wants and stop raising rates. How much does the Fed have to do to cushion the stock market against Trumpian uncertainty? How much to cushion the economy against the same?

It is an ugly situation for the Fed to navigate. So what do they do? I think the most likely approach is:

1. Hike rates 25 basis points to push rates at the edge of the lower range of neutral estimates. Allows the Fed to follow the data and push back on the notion that markets and Trump are driving policy.
2. Drop “further gradual increases” for language that imparts much more uncertainty about the future path of rate hikes. Makes clear that future rate hikes are not certain. Arguably also opens the door for a rate cut should the data turn sour.
3. Emphasize in the statement they are vigilantly monitoring financial, economic, and political developments around the world. Recognizes the fears of Wall Street.
4. Release forecasts that are on net more dovish than the September version. This may include a reduction in the estimate of longer run unemployment. This acknowledges that persistently low inflation implies the economy can run at a lower unemployment rate. Also recognizes the impact of weaker equity prices on the outlook.
5. Unlike September, when Powell emphasized the forecasts in his press conference, he will indirectly say to ignore the forecasts as he recognizes that they will remain unnecessarily hawkish.

As far as questions for Powell that I would like to hear:

1. He will of course not answer questions about Trump’s pressure on the Fed, so I don’t think reporters should waste their questions on that issue.
2. “What is the information content of the equity market decline? How does or doesn’t it impact the growth forecast?”
3. “The yield curve is now flatter than it has been in this cycle. How do you and your colleagues interpret the current shape of the yield curve?”
4. “Do you believe job growth remains in excess of that consistent with long-run price stability?”
5. “Are you viewing the potential impacts of trade war escalation as primarily supply side or demand side shocks?”
6. “Vice Chair Richard Clarida has revived forward looking inflation measures from the TIPS market as relevant policy guides. In contrast, your predecessor Janet Yellen downplayed the inflation expectations content of these indicators. Where do you stand on the issue?”
7. “What will trigger the Committee to reassess the pace at which the Fed is winding down the balance sheet?”
8. “How do you credibly claim to want to eliminate forward guidance when you retain the SEP as supposedly a key element of your communications strategy? Aren’t you just increasing uncertainty by eliminating an emphasis on the near-term path of policy, which should be more knowable, in favor of the less knowable long term forecast?”
9. “What is the greatest external risk currently concerning the Fed? Hard Brexit? Trade wars?”
10. “What is the greatest internal risk currently concerning the Fed? Housing? Corporate debt? Waning fiscal stimulus?”

Bottom Line: The baseline case is for a dovish hike that basically sends the message that the data is consistent with another rate hike but IF the economy turns slower more quickly than anticipated, this will be the last hike for some time if not the last hike of the cycle. The risk is that the Fed skips this meeting and leaves January open IF the data continues to support a hike. It is worth thinking about what the Fed would need to do to offset the impacts Trumpian uncertainty should that bleed over from Wall Street to Main Street.

The situation on Wall Street is, well, unpleasant, and it in turn is creating considerable uncertainty about the outlook for monetary policy in 2019. The Fed is now caught in an uncomfortable place. Powell & Co. ditched forward guidance in favor of a managing expectations via data-dependence relative to a medium-term outlook. That outlook is fundamentally hawkish as it describes policy as continuing to tighten even as growth decelerates. Moreover, incoming data remains supportive of that outlook.

This isn’t really a problem for rate hikes next year; the data could cut either way by March. It is a bit of a challenge for next week’s meeting as the Fed is loath to appear reactive to markets alone.

What can we say about the data? It’s not bad. Not bad at all. Some of it, such as the ISM surveys, are holding up better than I would expect given the likelihood that economic growth is transitioning to a slower pace of activity as 2019 approaches. The non-manufacturing ISM survey copied its sibling with a solid read in November:

The employment report for November was solid. Nonfarm payrolls grew a touch less than expected:

The three-month average is a bit softer at 170.3k, perhaps indicative of a softening of job growth. Or just an inability of easily finding workers when the unemployment rate dips below 4%. But, most importantly, given the high level of variance in this report, I don’t know that can really say much has changed in the labor market.

The same holds true for wage growth, which was a bit softer, but not inconsistent with normal variance:

On the good side, the strong labor market continues to deliver new workers, holding up labor force growth while preventing the unemployment rate from slipping:

The most forward looking indicator of the report, temporary employment, continues to signal a bright future:

Certainty a number that looking much more worrisome in 2016 than now. Likewise, while I see continued angst over the initial claims numbers, the rise is fairly minimal, occurs during a difficult time to seasonally adjust, and remains not very widely dispersed across the nation:

JOLTS report through October remained strong as well:

The data then remains consistent with a Fed rate hike in December. That said, market participants are picking up on something not in the data. Maybe it’s not anyone thing, but a combination of whole bunch of things. As a primary backdrop, I think the current economic situation places market participants in a very difficult uncomfortable situation. Growth is transitioning down, and we don’t know where it will stop. 2.5% or 1.5%? The latter is slow enough to take the Fed off the table. The former not so much.

Moreover, it seems likely that margins are under intense pressures at this stage in the cycle. Firms are caught between two rocks and a hard place: Tight labor markets, tariffs, and low inflation that prevents them from offsetting the first two factors. And if growth is slowing while labor markets remain firm, then productivity is not rising enough to provide a way out.

Finally, we have geopolitical risk just about everywhere. President Trump’s “bull in china shop” strategy with all of our trading partners leaves the US isolated when we could have pursued a unified approach to addressing issues with China. At home, Trump looks increasingly vulnerable and his response will likely be to create additional chaos. Brexit has devolved into a hot mess of a disaster.

What does the Fed do next month in response? Given the incoming data and the resistance of the Fed to be seen as reacting to market downturns, the baseline case remains that the Fed hikes in December and increases the uncertainty about the path of policy in 2019. The markets will interpret this dovishly, although I suspect the Fed was likely to want to create greater uncertainty about next year in any event.

The risk of course is that the Fed takes a pass next week. For many FOMC participants, I think that would be a bitter pill to swallow with the data lining up as it is, which is why it is difficult to make this the base case. That said, the January meeting will only be six weeks later; they could always come back for another bite at the apple at that time. There is reason to believe this is the correct strategy, but my suspicion is that the Fed will chose the data over the markets. To be sure though, given the fluidity of the situation, financial markets could take an even more severe turn for the worse by next week and scuttle any Fed rate hike plans.

Bottom Line: The data flow clears the way for the Fed to hike next week. The Fed doesn’t need to make any decisions on March yet, so they won’t commit to anything in 2019. That will be interpreted dovishly in this environment. If the data stumbles between now and March, the Fed will take itself off the table, assuming inflation remains quiescent. So far, market volatility by itself is likely not enough to derail next week’s rate hike. The Fed typically wants more to justify a policy change. 

Once upon a time, we had a pretty good story in play. It went like this: The Fed positions itself relative to this magical variable called r-star. Unfortunately, no one knows exactly where r-star is, but we can come up with a reasonable range of its values. And as policy rates entered into the lower bound of that range, future changes in policy will become more data dependent. Absent any evident inflationary pressure, the Fed could move more cautiously, assessing the data carefully before tightening further.

It was a good story, and it worked. But then New York Federal Reserve President John Williams blew up that story by downplaying the importance of r-star. This was apparently out of fear that market participants would assume an imminent pause was pre-ordained. The focus shifted away from neutral to talk of going above neutral. Forward guidance was ditched in favor of a focus on the Fed’s forecasts which confirmed the intention of going beyond neutral.

Of course, the forecasts were never supposed to be policy written in stone. But, realistically, the Fed’s forecast-based approach made it appear that the path of rates was not particularly data-dependent. I think, more accurately, that when central bankers started talking about going beyond neutral, they were really getting ahead of the data.

Then equity markets stumbled, oil fell, and the dollar rose. Fed officials apparently feared they had set in motion another Taper Tantrum or, almost worse, another 2015-16 episode. They then shifted the discussion back to r-star with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell noting that policy rates would soon be at the lower end of the range of neutral estimates, basically returning to the story that existed before Williams blew it up.

Like I said, I thought it was a good story. I still do. I like it. It was limited forward guidance; a broad range of potential outcomes, but with some structure. The Fed could basically flatten the yield curve, and then if further rate hikes were appropriate, shift the yield curve up. The long bond even lifted off its perch at 3.0%, giving the Fed some breathing room.

But going backwards is not so easy. Because going backwards kind of looks like panicking. And now you look like you are panicking yet still planning to raise rates in December! Seriously, if it was so important to turn the story around, why are we still talking about December? How do you spell P-O-L-I-C-Y E-R-R-O-R?

With that kind of messaging it makes sense to buy into the belly of the yield curve, which is what market participants have been doing in earnest, generating a messy outcome. The yield curve inverted between the 5 and 3 year treasury rate. Ever so slight an inversion, but an inversion nonetheless:

And the 10-2 spread sank closer to inversion:

It is generally thought the 10-2 inversion that is the long-leading indicator of recession, but I would add only if the Fed keeps hiking after the inversion. But we can worry about that later. For now, the 5-3 inversion is messy enough because it will raise additional concerns about December. So now it has the potential to be a nasty little cycle – the Fed backtracks, causing fear of a worsening economy, which inverts part of the yield curve, which raises further concerns about the economy, etc., etc.

Meanwhile, the data has drifted into the background. Yet that should still be relevant to the Fed. Notably, the ISM manufacturing report was a notch better than expected and holding in a range that one of my readers described as an “early cycle” print:

Except now we are much later in the cycle with a 3.7% unemployment rate. I have a hard time imagining that the economy started falling apart in the final quarter of 2018 yet left the manufacturing sector unscathed. I feel like the Fed’s dovish shift maybe got ahead of the data just as the hawkish shift got ahead of the data. Or the Fed’s dovish shift is already behind the data. Like I said, it’s complicated. We just don’t know what will be left after the sugar high of fiscal stimulus wears off. Nor do I think we should discount the possibility that under divided government, more spending is the path of least resistance.

Bottom Line: In my opinion, I think we focus on the data and the Fed’s basic forecast in the context of a policy rate that is entering into the neutral zone. The strong ISM report suggests that growth is not faltering quickly if at all, which is supportive of the Fed’s current expected path. But inflation remains tame, even softening, which suggests a more dovish path. A little give, a little take. It’s a long time to the March meeting, the next likely opportunity to hike rates under the gradual rate hike regime. Much can happen between now and then. If the data continue to suggest that the pace of activity is likely to place downward pressure on the unemployment rate, they will hike deeper into the neutral range before pausing.