While there are holidays today, I wanted to present you with a preview of tomorrow‘s extensive analysis – as regards stocks and the economy:
S&P 500 recovered from the intraday reversal to the downside, thanks to tech. Value‘s poor showing can be chalked down to the riskier junk bonds losing early gains, meaning the daily stock market move didn’t surprise much when bonds closing values are considered. What‘s though flying under the radar, is the turn in Treasury yields – a couple of days after FOMC, bonds are having second thoughts, and aren’t pushing the Fed to raise too steeply. Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised to see 75bp hike in July, to be continued with a few more 50bp hikes then. Coupled with the balance sheet that‘s about to shrink, that would finally start denting inflation – at the cost of real economy growth.
I say growth while I was looking for a Q1 GDP print to come in negative, and Q2 GDP would turn lackluster as well. Still, a full-fledged recession in the usual sense of the word (the consequences), won‘t hit until very late 2022 even though NBER might declare one (based also on unrelenting inflation data) earlier. All the typical signs are in – we had yield curve inversion, oil prices doubled in a relatively short amount of time, and inflation is entrenched above 5%. Whatever the Fed does – and it‘ll do a lot – inflation in essentials won‘t be dented all that much. There‘s no dodging the bullet in my view, and the markets would gradually go from living the soft landing fantasy to readjusting to the hard landing reality to come.
