Monday, October 2, 2023

Daily Economic Update: October 2, 2023


October, the month best know for: (a) The Panic of 1907 (also a good book), (b) Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, and (c) Black Monday (also a Showtime comedy), October 19, 1987....Ok, maybe it's best known for Oktoberfest or Halloween or pumpkin flavored lattes, or MLB Playoffs or something else, but here's to October's, lets hope not to make negative history.  September ended with the Atlanta Fed's GDP Now 3Q GDP estimate of 4.9% and the NY Fed GDP  Nowcast at 2.1% further evidencing the divergence in interpretation of the economy's performance.  This October starts with the government shutdown averted, for now at least, UAW still on strike and the prospect of a Kaiser Permanente healthcare strike, and the resumption of student loan payments.  Yields are up ~5-6bps to start the day, the 2Y is 5.10%, the 10Y is 4.62%.

On the day ahead it's ISM manufacturing data, construction spending and a Powell speech. The highlights of the week will likely be on the labor front with the JOLTS report Tuesday and Jobs report Friday.  There is also plenty of Fedspeak.
On the week:
Tues: JOLTS
Wed: ADP Employment, ISM services
Thur: Jobless claims
Fri: Jobs Day

In full disclosure, this author is not an Orioles fan, but any team that goes from 100 losses to 100 wins in a two year span deserves some credit.  In honor of the Orioles making the playoffs for the first time since 2016 and because their now injured closer had one of the best walkouts in all of baseball this year, for the month of October I'll be starting each post with an epigraph (see quote at top of post) from the HBO series The Wire.  There are plenty of business and leadership lessons one can learn from the series.

Speaking of business and leadership, the CNBC appearance by Barry Sternlicht of Starwood Capital Group on Friday is worth a listen.  Barry hits on the tug-of-war between Congressional spending and the Fed's inflation fight, discussing the "deficit out of control".  Maybe Barry believes in the Hamilton Norm? And the risk of fiscal dominance: "he's going to have to [go back to QE]".  If its true that our fiscal largesse is a problem (shh...don't tell Stephanie Kelton), many think it's inevitable that Powell will be forced to lower rates.  But maybe Powell will heed my favorite advice to central banker's courtesy of Peter Stella: “I define central bank independence in one sentence, it's the ability to raise interest rates when the Treasury doesn't want you to. And the Treasury almost never wants you to, because of the cost of the debt.” which might force political leaders to find other solutions.

Friday's PCE seemed to fall into the goldilocks reading camp, but NY Fed's Williams indicated rates should remain high for a long time: "My current assessment is that we are at, or near, the peak level of the target range for the federal funds rate. I expect we will need to maintain a restrictive stance of monetary policy for some time to fully restore balance to demand and supply and bring inflation back to our 2 percent longer-run goal."  He used the analogy of layers of an onion and that the inner layer of inflation, including shelter and services, will continue to be the most challenging.

Economist Brad DeLong had a good substack post discussing both the PCE read as well as the recent expert commentary on the risk of continued rising yields.  He concludes his post as follows: "if either BlackRock or JPMC actually thought that 10-Year Treasuries were going to 7% with any confidence, they would have and would have told customers and clients to take positions and the 10-Year Treasury would already be at 7%. It isn’t.  There may well be more inflationary shocks in our future. But it really looks like the shocks in our past—the reopening-bottleneck shock, the fiscal insurance against a return to secular stagnation shock, and the Putin attack on Ukraine shock—are now in our past. And, right now, the ocean looks remarkably calm again."

XTOD: If someone asks you to define "chutzpah," you no longer need to say "like when a guy who killed his parents asks for clemency because he's an orphan." 
You can say, "like private equity providing loan-shark liquidity to investors in illiquid PE funds."

XTOD: We talk and write a lot about all the bad ways the pandemic hit the economy. We should talk more abt the surge in entrepreneurship it unleashed — reversing a decades-long decline.   It’s not a mirage. 

XTOD: important point here: these systems are much better at doing tasks than jobs.  and giving people better tools to do their work faster often leads to qualitative changes in what they can do.  (of course, over the long run, we expect these systems will be able to do all of some of today's jobs and aren't trying to hide the ball on that. confident we will find new and much better jobs when that happens!)

XTOD: Duane “Keffe D” Davis, the man who admitted to being in the car used to gun down Tupac Shakur in 1996, was arrested and indicted Friday in Las Vegas for the murder of the legendary rapper, according to multiple sources.


https://x.com/jasonzweigwsj/status/1707833733162676528?s=20
https://x.com/jimtankersley/status/1707726818231361610?s=20
https://x.com/sama/status/1707872336115098002?s=20
https://x.com/Forbes/status/1707873766368305344?s=20

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