Monetary Policy
What to Expect: 1. The Fed will continue moderating its pace of rate hikes, stepping down to 25 basis point hikes. 2. With favorable disinflationary data coming in from both wages and prices since the last meeting, the key question is whether or not the Fed continues to think it
As we await the Q4 Employment Cost Index (ECI) release tomorrow (forecasting consensus: 1.2% QoQ, 4.9% CAGR; Q3: 1.2% QoQ, 4.8% CAGR), two key points to keep in mind. 1. The Q4 Data Showed Slowing Across Many Wage and Wage-Relevant Indicators, Potentially To 4.2% annualized.
The Fed is arguing that inflation is driven by the cost-push impacts of wage growth on service prices. This is a traditional view, but the pandemic recovery has been anything but textbook. In our view, the primary nexus is a demand-pull relationship. The core question for the Fed ought to
What to Expect: 1. The Fed will step down from their breakneck pace of 75 basis point hikes to a still very brisk 50 basis point pace of hikes. 2. FOMC members are likely to signal that the peak Fed Funds Rate will be above 5%, likely in the target
Market rents are decelerating, which means CPI-measured rents – and with them, core and headline CPI – should ultimately decelerate as well, with a lag. But is this deceleration due to the Fed’s actions? Or is it because job growth is slowing down endogenously, as many have been expecting over this
Summary 1. Friday's Q3 ECI release showed a modest slowdown in the pace of wage growth. Coupled with what we already knew about Q3 employment growth, we are continuing to see a slower—though still highly respectable and resilient—pace of gross labor income growth (~6.1% annualized
This is the second piece of our vacancies series. In this piece, we refute specific vacancy-backed arguments that the Federal Reserve will need to engineer a recession in order to bring inflation under control.
The Federal Reserve has given job vacancy data center stage in assessing the strength of the labor market. The theoretical and empirical issues with vacancies data show that this is a mistake.
