LONDON | By Michael Pond and Chirag Mirani at Barclays | Some at the Fed believe that a higher inflation target could be a good strategy, though one that is difficult to communicate. Instead, in our view, it has an implicit near-term tolerance for above-target inflation; forward breakevens should be higher as a result.
By Benjamin Cole at Marcus Nunes’ Historinhas | Recently Federal Reserve Bank President Charles Plosser opined that even periods of mild deflation could be welcome in the United States, and that Fed should have but a lone goal, and ideally that is zero inflation.
MADRID | By Julia Pastor | The Fed and the ECB launched their unconventional monetary policies starting from different positions as their economies’ financial structures are not the same. Also their forward guidance diverged, but both central banks tried to boost the real economy and were effective. The uncertainties about the future would revisit those similarities and contrasts.
NEW YORK | By Ana Fuentes | Thursday was Janet Yellen’s big day. In front of the Senate Banking Committee she ran through her prepared speech (released by the Fed on Wednesday) and acknowledged “the risks” of injecting QE steroids to the U.S. economy for too long. However, she argued, inflation is still too low and unemployment rate, too high. “The benefits exceed the costs” of the Fed’s current policies, she said. Will we see any tapering soon? Certainly, but not yet.
SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes | It is encouraging that Obama may soon have to fill up to 5 slots in the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. Maybe it´s expecting too much that he´ll think that´s a very important thing to happen at times like the present. He´s already ‘failed’ in a previous instance when he had 3 slots to fill, leaving them open for a long time and even failing to get an appointee approved! The low quality of some recent Fed Governors is glaring.
SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes | For less bounce! The Philly Fed has called the measure of GDP obtained from “crushing” the usual measure of GDP (expenditure based) and the income-based measure GDI GDP plus…
SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes | When Bernanke took the Fed´s helm the gap had been closed. What happened going forward, in particular the complete loss of nominal stability in 2008, which made the financial crisis immensely more severe, is the doing of the Bernanke Fed.
SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes | One thing MMs have been saying for a long time is “stop talking about inflation”. But everyone else insists on doing so and now they are trapped.
LONDON | By Barclays analysts | We now expect Fed to taper in March 2014. The September payroll report was on the soft side, with nonfarm payrolls rising 148k and private payrolls rising only 126k. These numbers were below our (200k) and consensus (180k) expectations for headline payroll growth. In light of the moderate tone of the September employment report, we have pushed out our expectation for the first Fed tapering in the pace of asset purchases to March 2014 from December 2013.
SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes | It is a common occurrence with sports idols and some teen idols to be demonized in the next stage of their lives. But among Fed Chairmen, Alan Greenspan surely gets the ‘honor’ of being the first.