federal reserve

The Murky Macro Picture

James Bailey2 Comments

Last June I wondered if we were seeing the peak of inflation, and by at least one major measure I called the peak exactly:

At the moment, though, I’m feeling more confused than prophetic. The big question a year ago was how long it would take the Fed to get inflation down to reasonable levels, and how much collateral damage they would do to the real economy in that effort. Today most current indicators make it look like they pulled off the miraculous “soft landing”. Inflation over the last 12 months is still high, but over the last 6 months we’re nailing the Fed’s 2% annualized target. This has hit a few sectors of the real economy hard, with housing slowing dramatically and tech doing mass layoffs, but the overall picture is great: GDP growth was around 3% the last 2 quarters, and the 3.4% unemployment is the lowest since 1969.

What’s confusing about this is that we have a hard time believing we really got this lucky. Its like your plane lost power, you diverted course for an emergency crash landing, and once you touch down and find yourself seemingly unharmed you look around and wonder if the plane is about to explode. Consumer sentiment is worse than it was in the depths of Covid; business sentiment has been falling for over a year and is almost down to March 2020 levels. Betting markets forecast a 50% chance of a recession in 2023, and the yield curve is strongly inverted (one of the best predictors of a recession, though the guy who first noticed this says it might not work this time):

Finally, M2 money supply is shrinking for the first time since at least 1960, and I believe the first time since the Great Depression. This bodes well for inflation continuing to moderate, but its also one more indicator of a potential recession.

To sum up, most of the indicators of the current state of the economy look great, while most indicators of its near-term future look awful. So which do we trust?

My guess is that we avoid recession in 2023, but honestly this is mostly the gut feeling of an optimist. There’s no one knock-down piece of data I’d point to in support; its more that things are currently going well, and usually the best prediction is that tomorrow will be like today unless you have a good reason to think otherwise. The main reason people expect a slowdown is because of the Fed’s actions to fight inflation. The Fed itself predicts that they will cause a slowdown, but not a recession. Their most recent summary of economic projections from December predicts GDP growth slowing to 0.5% in 2023 and unemployment rising to 4.6%.

I think the “so what” outlook is also murky. Stocks have already fallen a lot from their highs and a recession already seems somewhat ‘priced in’, so even if I thought one was coming I wouldn’t necessarily sell stocks. On the flip side US stocks are still quite expensive by historical standards, so I don’t want to buy more on the assumption that they’ll rise more on good economic news this year. You might want to lock in decent rates on long-term bonds if you think the Fed will cut rates in response to a recession, but the inverted yield curve shows this is already somewhat priced in. 1-year bonds yielding almost 5% seems decent in either scenario, I have some and I’ll probably buy more, but 5% returns are nothing to get excited about. I’d like to hear suggestions but to me the small direct betting market on a potential recession is the clearest “so what” for anyone who does have a confident view about this year’s macro picture.

Is this the peak of inflation?

James Bailey1 Comment

I think so, though the path back to 2% is a long one. Two months ago I wrote that “the Fed is still under-reacting to inflation“. We’ve had an eventful two months since; last Friday the BLS announced CPI prices rose 1% just in May, and that:

The all items index increased 8.6 percent for the 12 months ending May, the largest 12-month increase since the period ending December 1981

Then this Wednesday the Fed announced they were raising interest rates by 0.75%, the biggest increase since 1994, despite having said after their last meeting that they weren’t considering increases above 0.5%. I don’t like their communications strategy, but I do like their actions this month. This change in the Fed’s stance is one reason I think we’re at or near the peak.

Its not just what the Fed did this week, its the change in their plans going forward. As of April, the Fed said the Fed Funds rate would be 1.75% in December, and markets thought it would be 2.5%. But now the Fed and markets both project 3.5% rates in December.

The other reason I’m optimistic is that the days of rapid money supply growth continue to get further behind us. From March to May 2020, the M2 and M3 supply exploded, growing at the fastest pace in at least 40 years:

Rapid inflation began about 12 months later. But the rate of money supply growth peaked in February 2021, then began a rapid decline. Based on the latest data from April 2022, money supply growth is down to 8%, a bit high but finally back to a normal range. Money supply changes famously influence prices with “long and variable lags”, so its hard to call the top precisely. But the fact that we’re now 15 months past the peak of money supply growth (and have stable monetary velocity) is encouraging. Old-fashioned money supply is the same indicator that led Lars Christiansen to predict this high inflation in April 2021 after successfully predicting low inflation post-2009 (many people got one of those calls right, but very few got both).

Stocks also entered an official bear market this week (down 20% from highs), which is both a sign of excess money no longer pumping up markets, and a cause of lower demand going forward.

Markets seem to agree with my update: 5-year breakevens have fallen from a high of 3.6% back in March down to 2.9% today, implying 2.9% average inflation over the next 5 years. Much improved, though as I said at the top the path to 2% will be a long one- think years, not months. Even the Fed expects inflation to be over 5% at the end of this year, and for it to fall only to 2.6% next year.

What am I still worried about? The Producer Price Index is still growing at 20%. The Fed is raising rates quickly now but their balance sheet is still over twice its pre-Covid level and is shrinking very slowly. The Russia-Ukraine war drags on, keeping oil and gas prices high, and we likely still have yet to see its full impact on food prices. Making good predictions is hard.

While I’m sticking my neck out, I’ll make one more prediction, though this one is easier- Dems are in for a bad time in November. A new president’s party generally does badly at his first midterm, as in 2018 and 2010. But this time the economy will be a huge drag on top of that. November is late enough that the real economy will be notably slowed by the Fed’s inflation-fighting effects, but not so late that inflation will be under control (I expect it to be lower than today but still above 5%). Markets currently predict a 75% chance that Republicans take the House and Senate in November, and if anything that seems low to me.

QE, Stock Prices, and TINA

Scott Buchanan1 Comment

The U.S. economy as quantified by GDP has been sputtering along in slow growth mode for a number of years. It took a huge hit in 2020 due to covid shutdowns and has not nearly recovered. But stock prices have been rocketing upwards, and this past year is no exception. Markets took a cliff-dive in March, but have since way overshot to the upside.

Here is a plot of the past five decades of U.S. GDP and of the Wilshire 5000 index, which approximates the total stock market capitalization in the U.S.:

Chart Source: St. Louis Fed, as plotted by Lyn Alden Schwartzer

These two curves have crisscrossed each other over the past five decades, but in recent years the stock market has roared to the upside. One of Warren Buffet’s favorite metrics as to whether stock are overvalued is to consider the ratio of these two quantities, i.e. the market-capitalization-to-GDP (Cap/GDP) ratio:

Source: Lyn Alden Schwartzer

The ratio is much higher than it has even been. The last time it got this high was in 2000, and that did not end well.

Continue reading →

Peering Inside the Balance Sheet of the Fed

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

A balance sheet gives a snapshot of a corporation’s assets and liabilities. The difference between total assets and total liabilities is (by definition) the value of the equity owned by the owners or shareholders of the company.

With, say, a manufacturing firm, the assets would include tangible items such as buildings and equipment and inventory, and intangibles such as cash, bank accounts, and accounts receivable. Liabilities may include mortgages and other loans, and accounts payable such as taxes, wages, pensions, and bills for purchased goods.

The balance sheet for a bank is different. The “Assets” are mainly loans that the bank has made, plus some securities (such as US Treasury bonds) that the bank has purchased. These assets pay interest to the bank. The money the bank used to make these loans and purchase these securities came mainly from customer deposits or other borrowings by the bank (which are considered “Liabilities” of the bank), and also from paid-in capital from the bank owners/shareholders. [1]  As usual, the current equity of the bank is assets minus liabilities. Thus:

Source:  BBVA

The Federal Reserve System is a complex beast. We will not delve into all the components and moving parts, but just take a look at the overall balance sheet.

Unlike other banks, the Fed has the magical power of being able to create money out of thin air. Technically, what the Fed can do with that money is mainly make loans, i.e. buy interest-bearing securities such as government bonds. The Fed makes its transactions through affiliated banks, so it credits a bank’s reserve account with a million dollars, if it buys from that bank a million dollars’ worth of bonds. Those bonds then become part of the Fed’s “assets”, while the reserve account of the bank at the Fed (which is a liability of the Fed) becomes larger by a million dollars. Since the Fed is not a for-profit bank, the “Equity” entry on its balance sheet is nearly zero. Thus, total assets are essentially equal to total liabilities.

The Fed also has the power of literally printing money, in the form of Federal Reserve Notes (printed dollar bills). These, too, are classified as liabilities. Thus, you are probably carrying in your wallet right now some of the liabilities of the central bank of the United States.

Before 2008, the balance sheet of the Fed was under a trillion dollars. Nearly all the “Liabilities” were the Federal Reserve Notes and nearly all the “Assets” were US Treasury securities. The reserve accounts of the affiliated Depository Institutions was minuscule. All that changed with the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-2009. To help stabilize the financial system, the Fed started buying lots of various types of securities, including mortgage-backed securities (MBS) [2]. The Fed thus propped up the value of these securities, and injected cash (liquidity) into the system.

Here is a plot of how the assets of the Fed ballooned in the wake of the GFC, from about $ 0.9 trillion to over $ 4 trillion:

Source: Investopedia

The initial purchases in 2008 were US Treasuries, which the Fed had prior authorization to do. To buy other securities, especially the mortgage products, required congressional authorization. The increased liabilities of the Fed which offset these purchases were mainly in the form of larger reserve accounts of the affiliated banks. The Fed started paying interest on these reserve accounts, to keep short term interest rates above zero at all times (otherwise the whole money market in the U.S. might implode).

 With the Fed relentlessly buying the mortgage and bond products, the interest rates on long-term mortgages and bonds was kept low. This was deemed good for economic growth. The Fed tried to sell off some securities to taper down its balance sheet in 2018, but that effort blew up in its face – – the stock market started crashing in response in late 2018, and so the Fed backtracked . You can look at weekly tables of the Fed balance sheet here.

Anyway, the GFC and its aftermath provided the precedent for massive purchases of “stuff” by the Fed. When the Covid shutdown of the economy hit in March of this year, the Fed very quickly went into high gear. Its balance sheet shot up from $4 trillion to $7 trillion in just a few months. It bought not only Treasuries and MBS, but corporate bonds. This was way outside the Fed’s original charter, but the crisis was so intense that nobody seemed to care whether these actions were legal or not. And now, to finance the huge deficit spending of the federal government in the wake of the shutdowns, the Fed has been buying up nearly the entire issuance of Treasury bonds and notes.

These actions may have long term consequences we will explore in later posts [3]. For now, the Fed has made it clear that it will keep interests rates near zero for at least the next couple of years. Invest accordingly.

ENDNOTES

[1] Huge caveat: This statement gives the impression that a bank must first receive say a thousand dollar deposit before it can make a thousand dollar loan. That is not the case. The reality is just the opposite: the act of making a thousand dollar loan actually CREATES a corresponding thousand dollar deposit. This is very counterintuitive, and I won’t try to explain or justify this point here.

[2] Technically, the Fed is not “buying” the mortgage-backed security (MBS). Rather, it is making a “loan” to the bank, and holding the MBS as collateral against that loan.

[3] It is now harder to take the federal deficit seriously as a constraint on spending:  the government can issue unlimited bonds to fund deficits, which the Fed will purchase to keep interest rates low. Yes, the government has to pay interest on those bonds, but the Fed has to return most of that interest to the Treasury, so the real cost to the government of that extra debt is low.

How Much Money Is There?

Scott Buchanan1 Comment

It is not straightforward to define what “money” is in a modern national economy. Simply tallying the amount of coins and paper currency is inadequate. Most buying and selling is now done by shifting numbers between abstract bank accounts, not by pushing a bundle of bills across a table.  Thus, these bank accounts serve the functions of money (medium of exchange and store of value). The question then arises as to which of these financial accounts to regard as money.

Among financial assets, there is a broad spectrum of liquidity. Typically you can write a check on your checking account which, when it clears, provides immediate and final settlement for a purchase.  On the other hand, if you want to tap your brokerage account with its holdings of Apple stock to buy a television, you would typically have to sell (liquidate) your stock. A third party would have to be willing to give you something more money-like (e.g. credit your money market fund at your brokerage) in exchange for the stock at some negotiated price. Then you might have to transfer the funds from your brokerage fund into your bank checking account before you can actually buy that TV.  Because of all these intermediate steps, and the fluctuating value of the stock before you complete the sale, the stock holding would not be counted as “money”, even though its value enabled you to ultimately make your purchase.

There are a number of measures of money in modern economies. In the U.S. some of these are:

M0: The total of all physical currency (coins and paper bills).

MB (“Monetary Base”): The total of all physical currency (coins and bill) plus Federal Reserve  Deposits (special deposits that only banks can have at the Fed). This is money essentially created by the government plus the Federal Reserve, which does not necessarily enter the private economy to be spent.

M1: Physical currency circulating outside of the Fed and private banking system, plus the amount of demand deposits, travelers’ checks and other checkable deposits. This is highly “liquid” money, i.e. accepted and used for transactions in the private economy.

M2: M1 + most savings accounts, money market accounts, retail money market mutual funds, and small denomination time deposits (certificates of deposit of under $100,000). The funds in these additional savings and money market accounts can in general be easily transferred to checkable accounts, and thus could go towards making purchases if desired.

MZM: “Money Zero Maturity” is one of the most popular aggregates in use by the Fed because its velocity has historically been the most accurate predictor of inflation. It is M2 – time deposits + institutional money market funds.

Below is a chart showing the growth in the U.S. in the past fifteen years of M0 (total currency, labeled “currency in circulation), MB, M1, and M2. The grayed areas are recessions, i.e. 2008-2009 and the present.  [1]

Various Measures of “Money” in the U.S.

The M1 money supply (green line) was about $1.4 trillion ( $1,400 billion on the chart) in 2005, was fairly steady for several years, then started a steady ramp up to $4 trillion by January, 2020. Due to the extraordinary events associated with the Covid-19 shutdown (government stimulus package plus Fed purchases of securities), M1 jumped up to $ 5.4 trillion by August of this year. M2 followed similar trends, though on a much larger scale, rising to$18.3 trillion this year. This compares to a current U. S. total GDP of about $21 trillion.

The lowest line on the chart is the physical currency (blue line), which has grown slowly but steadily. The “Total MB” (red) line, was essentially on top of the blue line up until the 2008-2009 recession. Since MB = physical currency plus reserves, this meant that the amount of money in the reserve balances at the Fed of the private banks was nearly zero before 2008. The reserves jumped up (difference between the red and blue lines) in 2009, with the onset of massive purchases of securities by the Fed (“quantitative easing”). The Fed buys these securities from the banks, and credits their reserve accounts. The Fed has tried to taper down its holdings in recent years (red line declining 2015-2019), but suddenly purchased trillions more this spring (red line jumping up in 2020).  Most pundits hold that all this Fed money injected into the financial system has been the major cause of the enormous rise in stock prices in the past decade, especially in the past six months.

[1] Chart produced on the St. Louis Fed “FRED” site, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/categories/24 . This site has a wealth of economic data. Unfortunately, it is not easy to change units, so I was stuck with “billions” instead of “trillions” for the axis labels. Also, the M0 and MB numbers were only available in “millions”, so I had to divide those numbers by 1000 to get them to fit on the plot with M1 and M2. The grayed out spots on the graph labels is where I blotted out the “ /1000 ” which the plotting software put in. It would have been cleaner, in retrospect, to have exported the data to Excel and replotted it there.