Fed's Monetary Policy Challenges Amid Economic Uncertainty

The Fed faces mounting pressure as economic indicators signal potential recession and job losses increase.

### The Fed's Dilemma: Economic Signals and Market Reactions
* 📉 The Federal Reserve is facing significant criticism, particularly after a concerning ISM manufacturing report indicated **more job losses**, with readings **worse than in September 2008**, the month of Lehman Brothers' collapse.
* 🔍 Analysts believe the Fed must **raise rates by 50 basis points** by September 18th, as failure to act may make them appear **insensitive to the deteriorating economic data**.
* ⚠ An emergency rate cut could signal to investors that the Fed perceives the economy as being in **crisis**, which would likely not be warranted unless there is a **severe credit market contagion**.
* 📊 Recent job data shows a net job destruction of **192,000** in the three months ending September 30, 2023, indicating that job creation must reach **175,000-200,000 monthly** to accommodate population growth.
* 🏠 Housing prices are declining, with only **47% of new apartments rented out** in the first quarter, suggesting potential **shelter disinflation** that could further impact inflation rates.
* 📈 The current earnings season reveals many companies are **missing revenue targets**, a sign of recession, as sales decline and layoffs increase, reflecting a **troubling trend in corporate America**.
* 💰 Despite market volatility, gold is becoming a favored asset as investors seek **safety amid economic uncertainty**, with central banks globally **increasing their gold purchases**.
* 🤔 As Americans express growing concerns about the economy, a significant portion believes we are **already in a recession**, highlighting the **precarious nature of the current economic landscape** and the Fed's **challenging position**.

the FED is definitely taking a lot of flack. There was a very bad report out the day after the FED met, which should have gotten more media coverage even than the labor market, than the jobs report itself. And that was when we saw the ism report come out for manufacturing that showed that in the factory sector, there are more jobs being destroyed. The reading was lower than it was in September 2008, and that was, of course, the month that Lehman Brothers collapsed. And then we got that jobs Friday after it. So, it's very apparent right now that the FED is behind the ball and that they really do need to play some catch-up. Judging from what Austin Goolsbee is saying, though, we're not going to get it. I don't think that they're going to have a choice by September the 18th. I think that they will have to go 50 basis points. They can try and talk a mean game, but as the data momentum continues, I think that they'll be left without a choice at a certain

point or they're going to appear to be completely obtuse or insensitive, really for a lack of better word. It's a 50-50 toss-up. If the Fed was to come out with an emergency rate cut right now, it could validate investors' worst fears. They could say, Gee, the Fed thinks things are so bad that they're having to do something that normally would be reserved for happening in the middle of a financial crisis. I'm afraid that a minor meltdown in the US stock market is not what the Fed would consider to be justification for coming in with an emergency rate cut at this point. If we start to see contagion into the credit markets, completely different story. I think that we will see Fed officials leaning that way in the days to come. And of course, Powell, the content, the theme of this year's Jackson Hole is so nebulous, the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. He can make his speech be whatever he wants for it to be. The Jackson Hole speech is its own tool in the monetary policy toolbox, so he can

have that broadcast whatever he wants for it to be, whether it's a fed that's going to be more aggressive. But you know what? He's got some really close good top lieutenants, Christopher Waller being one of them. I would be paying attention in the coming weeks, again depending on where the data go from here, but I would be paying attention to what they have to say. Even before Jacksonville, it was interesting Jim Bullard, who is of course no longer with the fed, he's now the head of produ business school. But he was on the wires today saying that emergency rate cut would send the wrong signal, and unless there is a credit event. And J Pal's Boogeyman by far is if Bond issuance was to dry, and that is actually something that is within the fed's purview. The stock market is not, but if we start to see credit drying up, that is something that could cause the FED to be prompted for an emergency rate cut. We did have 10 investment grade Bond sales scheduled for today that I don't believe

any of them priced, and that's investment grade. So, if there is contagion into other markets, all bets are off. If you think of the Fed, the Fed released its senior loan officer survey today. Why does it conduct this survey every quarter? Because it's concerned, and always should be concerned, about the amount of credit that's being fed into the US economy. If one of the main mechanisms of allocating credit, the capital markets, was to seize up, and you would see bond issuance dry up, that is within the Fed's purview, and it wouldn't take that long. We had a record 41 days in late 2018, which prompted Powell to pivot. And what happened in those 41 days? Not a single junk bond was sold. So, that will definitely get him acting if we start to see days after days after days with no issuance in the market. If you're studying the data in its revised form, for goodness sake, we had 192,000 net job destruction in the three months ended September 30, 2023. So,

We're definitely there if you're looking at the revised data. Of course, that's not what Powell tends to cite when he's at podiums and what have you. But no, even job creation of 114,000, given we know that immigration has gone up as much as it has, has now raised the bar. You must be creating 175,000-200,000 jobs a month in order to absorb the population growth and the growth of the workforce into the labor market. If we stop hitting those goals, and again, the unemployment rate is at 4.3%, the underemployment rate is at 7.6%, and this is off of a base that started with five. There are more Americans working full-time jobs and part-time jobs at the same time. There's an overabundance of data that justifies 50 basis points. The reporter asked Jerome Powell that question when he was at the podium, and he could not come up with an answer as to where he felt inflation was going to be coming from.

and that is the biggest problem right now. If you look at true inflation, TruFlation, it's got a 97% correlation. True inflation gave us the raw data back to January of 2012. That means it's almost perfectly aligned with headline CPI. It was at 1.54%. That means that future CPIs are going to be printing below the Fed's 2% target. And that's something I believe. Remember, this is Jerome Powell, Esquire. He's a trained lawyer, so he follows other data sources. And I promise you, he knows that the inflation beast has been beaten down to a pulp. And now we're actually in a very precarious situation. As the chief economist at ADP said a few days ago, if Powell is looking for inflation, he's not going to find it in wages. And that is the most insidious form of disinflation that exists, is wage disinflation. That's the real risk right now. And by the way, the Fed does not have tools to fight that. Do you have food?

prices falling for heaven's sake. I mean, excuse me, yes, outright deflation in real time in food. Americans are buying less food. You've got home prices that are turning very hard. Rents are coming down. We only had 47% of the new apartments that were coming out of the construction pipeline in the first quarter even rented out. That means 53% were not rented. So, the largest input to inflation is going to come down and come down hard. It's going to be very problematic for policymakers to begin pondering in this environment because they waited for so long. It's been since last July that they've waited, and rates are higher than they've been in years and years. They're going to have some explaining to do in terms of why they didn't go in. Why didn't you go in July 2024 when the tea leaves were all right there for you to read? Unless there is kind of an Immaculate Conception type of moment for this economy, and we see stocks just go

rip every risk asset in the world if that was to come flying back and Corporate America was to stop doing things like oh I don't know Intel took an 8 and a half billion dollar loan and oh and then they said hey we're going to lay off 20,000 people so if you can get Corporate America to stop cutting jobs as aggressively as they are you're going to have a better chance but right now Corporate America is they've got their machete out we've seen more CEOs replaced in the last six months we've seen 1,000 CEOs replaced why are they being replaced so they can replace workers with AI or get rid of them and that's exactly what Corporate America is doing right now we're hearing it every time we hear an earnings call it's also you know if you want to get your stock to pop what do you do fire people if the S&P 500 was down 3% the emerging market MSCI index was was down 4.2% the Mexican

peso got destroyed. Any proxy, anything that is tangentially attached to the carry trade, is being absolutely pummeled. And in addition to that, what people are not talking about, which is highly relevant, is that the Bank of Japan cut its quantitative easing program in half. The Bank of Japan has quietly been pumping money into the global financial system. The global financial system loves liquidity; it loves any source of liquidity. When you take that away, and they're the last of the micans, they're the last central bank that had been engaged in quantitative easing, when you cut that in half, boy, markets are not going to like it. Nobody can quantify the size of this. The bigger risk, the much bigger risk, is risk parity low. There are certain strategies that are underlying the stock market that, if they start to unwind in addition to the carry trade unwinding, that's when you start to see kind of a cascade effect, and then you see potential for there to be disruption in the credit markets. So, I think one of the hallmarks of the current earnings

season is you're hearing so many companies miss the Topline, and you can do all kinds of accounting magic with your bottom line and play all kinds of games to make your profits, to make your bottom line work. But we are seeing one company after another miss their top line. That is how recession manifests. That is how you see a recession. It's when companies' sales are declining, and that is exactly where we are today. And that is how recession bleeds up from Main Street to Wall Street. It's when you have things begin to go wrong during earning season, and we're seeing the red flags now. Until the FED lowers interest rates, historically speaking, Equity markets do not correct. That is history. Until the yield curve completely un-inverts, which by the way it did for a hot minute today, scared the Dickens out of the market. But until the yield curve moves into positivity, Equity markets do not tend to correct. We could theoretically whip saw around here. We had stocks up a day last week. The NASDAQ 100 was up 5% in one day. 5% the NASDAQ

was down, I think to day three and change, but still we had a day last week that the NASDAQ, and that's exactly what 2000 looked like. If you go back and look at the stock charts of the year 2000 prior to the market finally falling out of bed, you had tremendous volatility in markets. And I think that that's why we're seeing own volatility, go long volatility, be ready, because if you're not already in it, you're going to miss the move. And that's exactly what happened at the open. The VIX went spiking to the highest degree since the 9s, and that's why you have to be positioned in order to take advantage, take profits when all of a sudden risk assets correlate and completely fall out of bed. I think the only thing that sort of behaved today was gold. It's critical to look at the history of gold because even in disinflationary, deflationary moments, if there's a financial crisis, gold tends to outperform. And you're also seeing people

pile into gold. People in China, central banks around the world are buying as much gold as they can get their hands on. So, this is typically the stuff of, you know, Neil Howe's fourth turning type thing. People are trying to buy insurance because they feel like they've been living in a drought for so long that their house might burn down. That's when gold really shines, is when you're using it as a protective mechanism for the rest of your portfolio. We know that there are a lot of margin calls being triggered right at the beginning of the pandemic. We saw gold underperform, not for long, but it definitely underperformed because if you're holding on to this stock or this asset class and you get that Margin Call, you're going to raise liquidity where you can. And I think that that's why we've seen gold behave relatively better than other asset classes. I think you need to be really careful when you're looking at home price data. It usually reflects the world as it was 3 months ago and kind of

where we were coming into the peak spring selling season a few months ago, and there were a lot of hopes and aspirations at the time. Sellers were a little bit more reasonable and realistic in their approach to pricing their homes. Since then, I would say it's a little bit of a different world. People in the world of residential real estate are surprised, surprised right now that they're seeing inventory build as rapidly as it is. So, you're now, you've got kind of a running count in the background of the number of American cities where inventory is higher than it was in 2019, and that's going to become very problematic fairly quickly, which is why you had more of a reaction to the consumer confidence data than you did to the housing price data. The housing price data is not problematic enough for the FED because we know that housing is weakening enough that a year from now, we're going to talk about the risks of shelter disinflation and how heavy that could weigh on inflation coming down as quickly as it will be once we're

starting to reflect falling home prices, and that's where we're headed. Given the rapidity with which we're seeing inventory build, the flip side of it is I think a lot of us consumers are hoping they're going to be okay. It was interesting American's view of the broad economy and about how businesses are going to be doing in the coming year have absolutely collapsed, but they're still kind of saying, But for me, I think things might be a little bit at risk but still okay. We're in kind of the sweet spot where if my neighbor loses his or her job, we're in a recession. I think most Americans, and I think most polls are telling you right now that the majority of Americans think that we are in recession, not heading for one. I'm talking about mainstream polls; 52%, 56% of Americans think that we're in recession, but that okay as long as you're just talking about your neighbor. But that old adage is if your neighbor loses his or her job, you're in recession.

If you lose your job, you're in a depression, and so we're not there yet. Job losses aren't widespread enough yet, but we're getting there, and specifically because CEO and CFO confidence is not improving. It's just kind of stuck in a range. That means we're not quite finished cutting costs, so this next earning season, we're going to see yet another round of layoffs coming out of corporate America. And I think that we might be at the point where this is starting to affect more than just your neighbor. What we're seeing is, in a word, momentum, and we're seeing layoff announcements arrive in months that are not typically. April shouldn't have had more layoffs announced than January, and yet that's what we saw in 2024. That was unusual on a seasonal basis, and when things begin to fall off their seasonal normal patterns, you always see joblessness rise in the summer. You know, Detroit shuts down its auto factories for a few weeks, and so you see a little bit of seasonality there and a little

bit of weakness into July. These are all things that we expect, but it's the broad nature of the layoffs that we're seeing. It's when a logistics firm in Humble, Texas, on a Thursday afternoon via text. They learned that their company that was owned by private equity is closing, and you're not getting your paycheck on Friday, and it's only going to affect 2,000 employees. It's when things like that happen, which just happened, that you start to say there's cracks in the edifice that are not just your normal ebb and flow of the business cycle in any given year. I think that too many people on social media, it's so much fun to, let's have a good solid hour of bashing, let's bash the J-Pow pinata because it's so much fun. It's so much fun to liken him to his predecessors. Janet Yellen was afraid of going up on the hill. She didn't want to talk to anybody in Congress. She didn't want to talk to anybody, period. Ben Bernanke was also, it was pretty

shy and he wasn't politically shrewd. Uh, Allen Green span different story. He liked to talk to people on the hill, mainly presidents. He loved the Limelight. So, J. Pal is the exact opposite of all of these people. You know, it's a matter of public record by law, but he has been to see more Congress people on both sides of the aisle than any of his predecessors. So, he's been very active in speaking with people in Congress about what are your constituents seeing, feeling, and it's not to be political, it's actually to be the opposite of political. He was pointedly asked two press conferences ago, you know, if the data weakened materially enough such that there's a justification for going in September, will it stop you? That is the FOMC meeting that precedes the election, and it's rare that J. Pal goes off script when he's up at that podium after the Fed meets, but kind of a dark cloud crossed his face, and he said, Every meeting is live, every meeting is live.

politics won't change that, so he's a different animal. And if we see, as we saw kind of as 2007 turned into 2008, we'd seen little baby steps in the unemployment rate, and it was inching up a tenth at a time, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, and then boom came early 2008, and you saw big moves in the unemployment rate. If that's where we are in the July and the August employment reports, could certainly see him having that first break cut arrive in September. In environments like these, when you basically have the year 2000 and the Year 2007 walk into a bar, hook up, one-night stand, you've got just as much stock market overvaluation as you do over-indebtedness. Well, you know Corporate America, household balance sheets are just a terrain wreck. It's not mortgage debt, but right now the average American family is paying more in non-mortgage debt interest than they are in mortgage debt interest. Extraordinary times that we're in right now when you

have this kind of a dynamic, you know, that markets are overvalued. It's just something innate. You ignore most charts except the one that says the top 10% of the stock market is now more concentrated than it's been at any time since, and you say, you innately say, since 2000, but that's not the answer anymore. Now it's since 1929, so now you have my attention. You simply have my attention. Do stocks care? No, no. It's not until the FED actually lowers rates, no jawboning, no we're going to taper quantitative tightening, and none of that. When the FED actually lowers interest rates, some stock jock on a trading floor says, Oh, bleep, the FED thinks we're in recession, and that's the only time you're going to get the attention of a stock CH. It's like, Oh, bleep, and then it happens, and then it doesn't matter if consumer confidence falls out of bed and CEO confidence doesn't pick up. None of it matters until somebody says, Get me an

economic calendar. The FED just lowered rates. What's Happening Here in the economy? How is that justified? Because until then, you're going to stay long. It's just the way it's always worked historically. If the Fed lowers rates in September and then the stock market does what it's always done when the FED cuts rates and falls out of bed, they're going to say he's trying to throw the election. It's by Design, and J pal will probably be like, or the unemployment rate went up. Boom. You know the unemployment rate in May was already at our year-end Target of 4.0%. It's 7 months early. Are we paying attention? Yes, we are. But nobody's going to speak that logically about it. Nobody will be that sober about it. My Twitter feed will just go like a mushroom cloud of I told you he would bend over for anybody. And so it's going to be what it's going to be. You can't have Hey, I'm sitting around the pool.

conversation with somebody who's pondering, Hey, I'm going to turn 60 years old soon, and you know, I'm looking at, you know, forward to my retirement years, and where should I be right now, Danielle? And I'm like, Well, that depends on if you're serious about that retirement thing and, you know, how exposed you are to the stock. Well, I've got it all in the stock market. What are you talking about? Well, okay, if you're 100% stocks, we might should talk about retirement again. Oh no, it'll come back in a few years. And I, Well, you know, um, these cycles don't dictate their length. We just know what happens at certain times, and you know you're in the mortgage industry. Oh, things have really slowed down. Okay, good. Now you understand the economy is slowing. You can see it with your own eyes. So, um, you know, we go round and round, and what I, as gingerly as I possibly can, you know, a few months ago, I was like, You still own Bitcoin? Why don't you take that off?

the table and just plop it into the cues because the unemployment rates not where it needs to be for the FED to lower rates just yet. So why don't you take your gambling money out of Bitcoin and throw it into the NASDAQ just for fun and let it ride as far as the rest of your actual portfolio Goes. For the Love of God I don't think now is the right time to have it in the stock market if you truly want to retire in two years. So again it's all a matter would I say the same thing to somebody who is 30 years old no I wouldn't. But where you are in your career is really critical at times like this when there's a chart floating around that says we can only compare current market concentration to 1929. I mean those are things that should get Your Average Joe's attention if they had any Civics in High School.

"The Crash Will Be WORSE Than 2000" | Danielle DiMartino's Last WARNING

An inspiring channel for those who are seeking growth.


FREENVESTING

The FED is facing criticism for its delayed response to worsening economic data, particularly in the manufacturing sector.

There is speculation that the FED may need to implement a 50 basis point rate hike by September 18th to catch up.

The potential for an emergency rate cut is being debated, with a focus on the impact of credit market contagion as a key factor for the FED's decision-making.

Job creation has fallen short of the 175,000-200,000 monthly target needed to absorb population and workforce growth.

True inflation data suggests future CPIs will print below the Fed's 2% target, indicating that inflation is being effectively controlled.

Corporate America's aggressive job cuts and CEO replacements are contributing to wage disinflation, posing a risk that the Fed's tools may not be effective in addressing the current economic challenges.

The Impact of the Bank of Japan's Policy Change

The peso has been severely affected, along with other assets tied to the carry trade, due to the Bank of Japan's decision to cut its quantitative easing program in half.

This reduction in liquidity is causing concern in the global financial system, with the potential for a cascade effect and disruption in credit markets.

The current earnings season is showing a trend of companies missing their top-line sales, indicating a potential recession, while gold is seeing increased demand as a protective asset.

Current Trends in the Residential Real Estate Market

The residential real estate market is experiencing a rapid build-up of inventory, with many American cities now having higher inventory levels than in 2019.

Consumer confidence in the economy has plummeted, with a majority of Americans believing they are already in a recession.

Unusual patterns of layoffs and job losses are emerging, raising concerns about the broader impact on the job market and the economy.

Powell's Unique Approach and Current Economic Climate

Powell has been actively engaging with Congress members from both parties, aiming to understand their constituents' concerns.

He emphasizes that every Federal Reserve meeting is crucial, regardless of political pressures.

The current economic environment shows signs of overvaluation in the stock market and increasing non-mortgage debt for American families, raising concerns about a potential recession.

The FED's Rate Cut and Its Economic Impact

The FED has lowered interest rates, which historically leads to a decline in the stock market.

The unemployment rate has already reached the year-end target of 4.

0%, raising concerns about the economy's direction.

The speaker emphasizes the importance of considering one's investment strategy, especially for those nearing retirement, and highlights the unusual market concentration compared to 1929.