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Perspectives Contributor:

Stephen J. Douglass

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August 31, 2022

Back to School with Mr. Powell

Like so many K-12 teachers having to remind their students about the lessons they forgot over the summer, Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell’s speech in Jackson Hole last week was in many ways a recitation of the message he and his colleagues have delivered all year. There is no denying...
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June 15, 2022

Jay Powell’s Manic Monday

After two years of pandemic firsts, we thought we’d used the adjective “unprecedented” for the last time in this cycle. Then the Federal Reserve did something on Monday that we’ve never seen them do before: intentionally leak a monetary policy action through the financial press two days prior to a...
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May 19, 2022

Stuck in the Starting Gate: 20y Treasury Futures Update

When the CME Group initiated trading on the new 20-year Treasury futures contract in March, we expressed cautious optimism that the new product would gradually develop liquidity to become another tool for hedging long duration interest rate risk. That optimism has been disappointing so far. It seems the 20-year contract...
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March 31, 2022

A Potential New Tool in the LDI Toolkit

The CME Group launched a new product earlier this month — a 20-year Treasury futures contract. This follows the Treasury Department’s recent introduction of a 20-year bond, which has not gone as well as they had hoped. Once this long-duration Treasury derivative develops sufficient liquidity, it should provide liability-driven investors...
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November 19, 2021

Goods Prices Rise…For The First Time In 20 Years

Inflation has been a popular topic in recent client conversations, with good reason. Consumer prices are rising at the fastest pace since the early 1980s, raising questions about the path of monetary policy and the low-rate underpinnings of lofty risk asset valuations. As we first discussed last year, the pandemic...
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June 3, 2021

Constraints on Labor Supply Should Prove Temporary 

Total nonfarm employment in the US remains 8.2 million workers below the pre-pandemic peak reached in February 2020 and yet pockets of labor market tightening are already appearing. As is the case with other resources in the economy, both the supply of and the demand for labor have been extremely...
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April 14, 2021

Phantom Jobless Claims Mask the Labor Market Recovery

We’ve written ad nauseum in these pages about the distorted and misleading economic data that have been produced during the unprecedented economic volatility of the pandemic. Despite turning a skeptical eye on hundreds of data releases over the past twelve months, we continue to find novel ways in which the...
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March 9, 2021

Tantrum Without the Taper: FAQ on Recent Market Volatility

The recent volatility in bond markets has prompted quite a few inquiries from clients. Here we consolidate our thoughts on the most frequently asked questions. What exactly happened in the Treasury market last month? Treasury yields have been rising steadily since last summer but an important shift occurred in mid-February....
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November 19, 2020

A Conversation About The October Payrolls Report

Overheard on the NISA trading floor, Friday, November 6, 2020. Jess Yawitz: “Another strong payrolls report this morning, eh?” Stephen Douglass: “Yep, the jobs recovery continues to surprise to the upside. The details were even better than the headline figure too.” JY: “How so?” SD: “Well the headline figure showed...
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October 29, 2020

Making Up Is Hard To Do: The Fed Adopts An Average Inflation Target Part II

In a post earlier this week, we explained how the Fed’s new flexible average inflation targeting (AIT) framework is motivated by a desire to prevent the zero lower bound constraint from de-anchoring inflation expectations to the downside. The logic of the new framework is intuitive. If the zero lower bound...
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October 27, 2020

Making Up Is Hard To Do: The Fed Adopts An Average Inflation Target

In a landmark speech at the Jackson Hole conference in late August, Chairman Powell announced the first significant revision to the Fed’s operating framework since 2012. While the transition from a flexible inflation target to a flexible average inflation target might seem to be a subtle one, that may not...
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October 20, 2020

Initial Jobless Claims Only Tell Half The Story, And It’s Not The Good Half

Regular readers will know we’ve been on somewhat of a campaign against economic disinformation this year, describing how data errors and faulty seasonal adjustments have been sending misleading signals about the true state of the labor market. Alas, we are called into action yet again. Every Thursday brings the release...
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October 8, 2020

Service Required: The Unique Structural Impact of the 2020 Recession

The pandemic caused a recession unlike any other in American history. We’ve previously discussed the unprecedented speed of the shock itself and the policy response. The 2020 recession is also unique in the degree to which it has impacted service sectors of the economy. Financial economists are trained to closely...
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August 28, 2020

Progress

As we have been saying, the seasonal adjustment process for initial jobless claims has been wholly inappropriate given the scale of job losses during the pandemic. Because the process is multiplicative rather than additive, the adjustment factor has now inflated the actual claims numbers by over 4.6 million since March,...
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July 30, 2020

Seasonally Maladjusted: How Statistical Methods Have Destroyed 3.7 Million Jobs Since March

In this short note we demonstrate, primarily using a few examples and data points, how totally inappropriate it is to seasonally adjust initial unemployment claims during the pandemic and how doing so can lead to very misrepresentative “headline prints.” Why seasonally adjust claims? The purpose of seasonal adjusting is to...
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July 9, 2020

Labor Market Update: Objects in Mirror are Better than They Appear

The labor market continued its spectacular recovery in June. The jobs report released on Friday reflected a net gain of 4.8 million jobs, almost double the increase from May. The monthly change in nonfarm payrolls has set a record in each of the last four months: two record decreases followed...
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June 15, 2020

A 10 Million Job Surprise

The May jobs report produced the biggest surprise we have ever seen from an economic data release. Nonfarm payroll employment increased by 2.5 million in the month, a full 10 million jobs higher than the Bloomberg median forecast for a loss of 7.5 million jobs. Not a single one of...
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May 20, 2020

The Fed’s Crisis Playbook: Speak Softly and Carry an Unlimited Balance Sheet

COVID-19 has delivered an economic shock of unprecedented speed and severity. The Federal Reserve under Chairman Powell has responded with the most aggressive policy action in the central bank’s 107-year history. As well as cutting the policy rate to essentially zero and offering nearly unlimited repo financing, the Fed commenced...
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April 24, 2020

A Recession Unlike Any Other

The longest expansion in U.S. economic history ended in February. March ushered in a recession that will be unlike any other we have seen before. In the last five weeks, 26 million workers have filed for unemployment insurance. That’s more than the total number of jobs that were created in...
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March 12, 2020

Treasury Yields: How Low Can They Go?

This has been a frequent question from clients in the past week as the spike in cross-asset volatility sent Treasury yields plunging to record lows. The shortest and most accurate answer is: nobody knows. Just as nobody could have predicted that a novel strain of an otherwise common virus would...
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March 6, 2020

Coronavirus Fear Shocks Global Markets

Coronavirus has sent shockwaves throughout global financial markets. Since mid-February major global equity indices are down by 10-20%, investment grade US dollar credit spreads have widened by 30-50 basis points, and US Treasury yields have plummeted to all-time lows. The driving force behind this market turmoil is fear of the...
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November 18, 2019

State of the US Consumer in Four Charts

With no shortage of economic uncertainty in the world, it is natural to ask whether the US consumer can continue as the primary engine driving the expansion. Our answer to that question is yes. You’ve no doubt seen many of the well-known statistics describing today’s exceptionally strong labor market. The...
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October 9, 2019

FAQ: What Happened in the Repo Market Last Month?

A volatile September in the normally placid money markets inspired a number of client inquiries, and a few overzealous headline writers in the financial press. In this note we will review what happened, explain why we think it is more likely a technical disruption rather than an indication of broader...
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August 21, 2019

Global Bond Yields Plunge to Record Lows

Bond yields have fallen dramatically around the world this month, driven by the latest escalation of the trade war as well as signals that aggressive monetary stimulus will be forthcoming from central banks. Longer-tenor government bond yields in the US and Europe have fallen by 30-60 basis points this month,...
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July 10, 2019

The Waiting is the Hardest Part: An Update on the LIBOR Transition

The LIBOR transition continues. As we have outlined in previous notes, we are six years into a global effort to replace LIBOR with more robust reference rates. Though progress has been made, we can’t say at this point whether the transition will be successfully completed before the end of 2021,...
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January 3, 2019

Market Bids Farewell to the Fed’s Tightening Cycle

The last seven weeks have seen a dramatic repricing of the expected path of monetary policy. As recently as November 8, the fed funds futures market was pricing the Fed to hike all the way to 3%. Since then, more than two hikes have been removed from the expected path...
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November 14, 2018

SOFR, So Good

The LIBOR transition continues. A global effort has been underway since 2013 to reduce dependency on LIBOR, the benchmark interest rate discredited by a series of manipulation scandals and long criticized for reflecting bankers’ estimates of their borrowing costs rather than actual transactions. US dollar LIBOR has grown since the...
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October 16, 2018

China, the Goliath of the Treasury Market

After the latest round of the trade war, China has imposed tariffs on nearly all of the $130 billion in annual goods imports from the U.S. Though China could increase the tariff rate, they have effectively spent all their ammunition in terms of the scope of tariff application. As China-watchers...
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June 19, 2018

Fed’s Technical Adjustment to IOER is a Sign of Things to Come

It was a surprise to no one when the Federal Reserve hiked rates this past Wednesday. The purpose of this note is to describe the “small technical adjustment” the Fed announced it would make to its operating framework for managing overnight interest rates. Since the financial crisis, the Fed has...
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December 5, 2017

The Phillips Curve is Dead, Long Live the Phillips Curve!

The Phillips Curve describes the relationship between unemployment and inflation. First proposed in 1958, the theory holds that a low unemployment rate reflects a tight labor market that requires firms to raise wages to attract scarce labor. The Phillips Curve is therefore supposed to be downward sloping. Economists have since...
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November 2, 2017

Fed Takes First Step of $2 Trillion Journey

The Federal Reserve took the first step this week of what will be a long journey towards normalizing its balance sheet after buying nearly $4 trillion in securities from 2008 through 2014. The Fed had $8.7 billion in Treasury securities that matured on October 31. When those bonds matured, $2.7...
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May 19, 2017

Go Long!

The Treasury Department is considering issuing an ultra-long bond with a maturity greater than 30 years. The idea was first raised in post-election interviews with then-nominee for Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and formalized last month when Treasury requested a response on the subject from primary dealers and the Treasury Borrowing...
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