저자: PeterSchiff · 외국인
요약 보기
결론: 연준이 인플레이션을 제대로 잡지 못하고 있으며, 이미 경기침체 상태이고 결국 피벗(금리 인하)할 것이라 금·외환시장이 최대 수혜를 볼 것이다. 금리 정책: 75bp 금리인상은 28년 만에 최대지만 기준금리 1.5~1.75%는 8.6% 인플레이션에 비해 여전히 낮아 실질적으로 긴축적이 아니다. 중립금리 개념도 인플레이션 수준에 따라 달라져야 하며, 연준은 승리 선언을 서두르고 있다. 인플레이션 전망: 물가는 나아지지 않고 악화될 것이며, 생산자물가 두 자릿수 상승은 소비자물가 상승 여지가 아직 남아 있음을 의미한다. 소비자와 투자자의 기대는 상향 조정될 것이다. 소비 및 경제지표: 소비자신뢰지수 사상 최저, 저축률 역대 최저 수준, GDP 전망 하향 추세, 1분기 GDP -1.5%, 애틀란타 연은 2분기 전망 0%로 하향. 실질적으로 이미 경기침체 상태다. 역(逆)자산효과: 주식·가상화폐 폭락으로 자산이 증발하면서 소비가 위축되고 있으며, 모기지금리 6.25%, 카드금리 상승으로 생활비 부담이 커지고 있다. 실질임금 삭감: 물가가 15~20% 상승해 사실상 전 국민이 임금 삭감을 받은 셈이며, 실업률이 낮아도 소비 위축으로 침체가 올 수 있다. 퇴직연금 손실로 저축을 늘리려는 움직임도 소비를 더 줄인다. 정치권 비판: 바이든 행정부의 정유사(엑손모빌) 이익 공격, 윈드폴 세금 도입은 석유 투자를 위축시키는 잘못된 정책이다. 애플 등 기술기업의 이익은 문제 삼지 않는 위선적 태도도 지적. 주식 전망: 긴축이 심화되면 주식시장은 더 하락하며 약세장이 강화될 것이다. 연준은 결국 피벗할 것이고, 가장 큰 수혜는 주식이 아닌 금과 외환(외국통화) 시장이다. 리스크/조건: 연준이 긴축을 지속하면 주식 추가 하락, 피벗 시점은 불확실하다. 출연자 전망: 금·외환 강세, 주식 약세, 경기침체 심화 및 연준의 궁극적 피벗을 예상한다.
다듬은 글
the federal reserve increased interest rates of course they had been promising to increase interest rates in june and they delivered on that promise as much as the fed claims it doesn't care what the markets do it cares very much about what the markets do and so it tries to craft what it does with the markets in mind we have so much more debt now than we had in the past it's a whole different world just because the economy could survive five percent interest rates when we had a relatively small amount of debt to service doesn't mean the economy can also survive five percent interest rates when we have a mountain of debt to service both in the private and public sectors but nonetheless this 75 basis point rate hike is the biggest interest rate hike in 28 years so it's very rare that the fed moves by 75 basis points but the key benchmark rate is now between one and a half and one and three quarters so after all these rate hikes we're still below two percent and in a world where you have eight point six percent inflation interest rates below two percent are still highly inflationary and so the fed remains behind the curve despite this rate hike inflation is going to get worse it's not going to get better although powell is prepared to pretend that it will but i think both consumers and investors are wrong with these expectations and those expectations are going to be adjusted upward as they're confronted with reality what was neutral in the past when inflation was under two percent is not neutral in the present when it's over eight percent because neutrality is supposed to be an interest rate that is neither stimulative to the economy nor sedative to the economy supposed to have no effect well clearly an interest rate in a two percent inflation environment is gonna have a very different effect if you have the same interest rate in an eight percent inflation environment and so clearly if two percent was neutral in the past at a minimum eight percent would be neutral now and we're not going to get anywhere near 8 and so the fed is not going to get anywhere near neutral and if it's not even going to get neutral let alone restrictive what hope does it have of actually solving the inflation problem and returning the annual rate back down to two percent if the fed really was determined to make sure it eradicated inflation for good it wouldn't be talking about any victory claims simply because inflation was headed down they want to make sure that it is down and that it stays down powell should have said is we will not back off until not only inflation has returned to two percent but that it stayed at two percent long enough so that we're convinced that it's going to stay down there and not go right back up because what happens if inflation's eight and a half percent and then it goes down to five or four percent and the fed is okay great it's going to go to two and it never hits two and your next thing you know it goes up to ten the fed can't take any chances but i think the fed is already setting the markets up for a premature victory claim because i think the fed knows it can't actually beat inflation but it's hoping that maybe it can fool the markets into thinking that it beat it and it could pretend that it beat it by declaring victory even though a victory hadn't been won just got this inflation it's not like it's been here for a long time and so easy come easy go it just came around and now we're gonna get rid of it and the public doesn't expect it to continue because it's so new and all that is simply not true and again we have had inflation for a long time it's just that the public wasn't complaining about it for a long time because it wasn't this extreme but we still had it and of course when inflation was predominantly in financial assets nobody complained and of course in the early days of this inflation if you go back to 2008 9 10 the fed created a lot of inflation but what that did was prevent prices from falling not really pushing prices up if it wasn't for qe1 and qe2 the great recession would have been much greater and we actually would have seen a healthy decline in the cost of living in consumer prices why didn't that happen well because the federal reserve printed all this money there's an inflation problem in europe yes there's an inflation problem in japan there's inflation problems all around the world because central banks all around the world made the same mistakes as the federal reserve in fact the federal reserve may have been the leader and all the other central banks were following in their misguided footsteps there's signs everywhere that consumers are tightening their belts first of all look at all the stuff that is collapsing starting with all the macro economic data that is abysmal and i'm going to get into some of that in a little bit and consumer confidence which has collapsed to an all-time record low savings that have collapsed to near record lows gdp forecasts that keep ratcheting lower and personal wealth that is evaporating look what's happened to the stock market we are now in a bear market in the s p we had a collapse in crypto currencies a lot of wealth has evaporated and maybe the fed doesn't remember the goal of quantitative easing was to create economic growth through a wealth effect the idea was if the fed could make asset prices go up well people would be wealthier and they would spend more well it must work in reverse if asset prices are collapsing and people are less wealthy doesn't it stand a reason that they're going to spend less but not only are some aspects of personal finance collapsing other aspects are surging like the cost of food the cost of energy the cost of shelter what about interest rates which just got ratcheted up again in fact home mortgage rates now are six and a quarter percent they continue to go up credit card debt is at an all-time record high as credit card interest is surging so consumers have seen their wealth wiped out at the same time their cost of living is going up how could you say there's no evidence that consumers are going to be impacted by any of that and that they're not going to adjust their spending in consideration for what has just happened to their wealth and their cost of living but pal claims no there is no signs anywhere there's no indication that anything bad is happening to the consumer and the consumer is going to change his habits at all based on what's happened so number one that is a lie i mean why even tell that lie why not just admit the obvious especially since and here is the bigger problem the very goal of raising interest rates to fight inflation is to influence consumer behavior you're trying to stop consumers from spending you're trying to encourage them to save you're trying to diminish demand along with supply so that prices would come down so the very reason that pal is raising rates is to influence consumer behavior yet powell is claiming that there's absolutely no signs that any of the rate hikes have done anything to influence consumer behavior that they're behaving exactly the same now as they were before rates were increased which is an admission that the entire policy is a failure because he's not going to reduce inflation unless he reduces demand and he's not going to do that unless he changes consumer behavior and he claimed that he's doing no such thing he said the economy is in great shape he said there were no signs of a broader slowdown which also means there's no signs that inflation is going to slow down either double-digit core year-over-year inflation in producer prices that is a hot number and again all this shows is consumer prices have more room to increase because the producers are yet to pass on the full extent of their rising costs to their customers those price hikes are already baked into the cake and pretty soon the customers are going to be eating it in fact it's going to be rubbed all over their faces and this is more bad news for the fed and the economy but we got more bad news on the economy itself in q1 gdp contracted by 1.5 and so if we had another quarter of negative gdp we would officially be in a recession and of course nobody thinks the recession is anywhere in sight i mean maybe some people think that we might get a recession in 2023 but pretty much nobody believes that we're already in recession other than me despite the fact that we had a negative print for one quarter and all we needed was a second quarter well the atlanta fed as i expected revised its estimate down for that second quarter i thought they would revise it to below 0.5 and they did they revised it down to zero so now the atlanta fed is predicting absolutely zero growth a goose egg for the second quarter so technically if they're right it won't be a recession we would have dropped by one and a half percent in one quarter and then had zero growth in the next quarter but that's going to feel like a recession especially if you average the two quarters together and you get a negative number but if you look at the rate with which their projections are being downwardly revised not only does it look like q2 could be a negative quarter but it actually may be a bigger negative number than the one we got in q1 and that means of course that we are in a recession right now we've been in a recession since the beginning of q1 and if we're already in a recession imagine how much worse that recession is going to get as the fed continues to raise interest rates as rising prices continue to exactly pull on the consumer who now has to deal with the reverse wealth effect of watching their stock portfolios and their crypto portfolios crash of course everybody is so convinced that we can't possibly have a recession now because unemployment is so low setting aside the fact that unemployment is a lagging indicator and a lot of these jobs can disappear very quickly the reason that unemployment is typically associated with recession is because when people lose their jobs they tend to cut back on their spending and that's normally because their unemployment checks are not nearly as high as their paychecks now that wasn't the case during covet and that was one of the problems so many people received more in unemployment than they earned in salary but setting that aside unemployed people spend less and that bleeds into the gdp and that leads to recession well what's happening right now even though people are still employed they have to cut back on their spending because prices have risen so much effectively inflation has given almost every american a huge pay cut because the actual cost of living is probably up 15 to 20 now maybe your job you've got a raise and you're making five to ten percent more but you still have a huge pay cut and there are a lot of people who aren't employed that retire they're living on a fixed income so they didn't get a raise at all they had a big increase in their cost so everybody has a pay cut so now everybody has to cut back on their spending think about it this way let's say that 10 of the people lose their jobs and don't spend anything but what happens if a hundred percent of the people get a ten percent pay cut that decline in spending is the same thing as ten percent of the people spending nothing a hundred percent of the people spending ten percent less so because inflation is effectively giving every worker a huge pay cut even though these workers still have jobs they're going to spend a lot less in real terms than they used to and that could cause a recession even though unemployment is still low spending can contract and you're in a recession but it's not just higher prices taking a big bite out of people's paychecks it's the fact that many of those people have now seen a big reduction in the value of their retirement savings because of the big drop in the stock market or maybe cryptocurrencies and so now these people feel that since they've had such a big drop in the value of their retirement accounts they now have to start making larger contributions to those accounts to make up for what they lost well if they're going to contribute more that means they have to save more and that means they have to spend less another reason that a lot of people are going to cut back on their spending to rebuild their savings and that also pushes the economy into recession of course pal wasn't the only one making excuses for inflation and trying to blame it at other people president biden is doing the same thing as our other democratic members of congress only they're not just blaming it on putin anymore they're really trying to blame domestic oil companies exxon mobil in particular the president accused exxon of making more profits than god i mean i don't even know that god makes any profits but what's wrong with oil companies making a profit i mean it's a lot better than oil companies losing money because if you want more oil where's it gonna come from it comes out of profits now the democrats want to increase taxes they want a new version of a windfall profit tax well what is the profit tax gonna do it's gonna diminish the money that oil companies have available to invest in more exploration and more drilling and of course if you threaten to take profits away anytime you reap them then why take the risk because after all there are times when the oil industry is losing a lot of money you know we never have calls to subsidize them hey these oil companies are having these big losses maybe we should give them some government bailout money how many people want to bail out exxon mobil when oil prices were negative i mean how can you have a situation where it's heads you lose tails the government wins when oil prices are low you get stuck with the losses but the minute they're high the government wants to take away the profits i mean why does the government never want to take away the profits of the tech companies apple makes a lot more money than exxon mobil why don't they ever want to take apple's profits where's the windfall profit tax there why don't they talk about how apple is gouging the customers by overcharging them for their iphones no for some reason apple can charge whatever the market will bear for its products but if exxonmobil wants to charge a market price somehow it's gouging and we need to take away their profits but probably the biggest hypocrisy when it comes to the president and what he's saying about exxon and other oil companies because he's also demanding that they produce more oil he's saying they're too greedy to produce more oil they want the price to stay high and they don't want to produce more but of course if they produce more they'd sell more and they'd actually make more money so the whole charge is ridiculous anyway stock market is concerned if the fed is in fact now getting serious about fighting inflation as a lot of people are hoping for there's that old saying be careful what you wish for because you just might get it because if you're a stock market bull and you've been wishing for the fed to get serious about inflation well if they are then the market is going much lower because the worst thing that can happen to the stock market is a serious inflation fight but as i said i think the fed is going to blink in this game of stock market chicken because as the stock market continues to go down and this bear market gets even more ferocious when you add that on top of all the negative macroeconomic data that's going to get even more negative as a result of falling stocks but at some point the fed is going to pivot the only question is when are investors going to figure this out discover that the fed is not actually serious about fighting inflation it's just trying to create the false impression that it's serious because if it was serious it would have already done a lot more the biggest beneficiary of that pivot is not going to be the stock market it's going to be the gold market it's going to be the foreign currency market
Comments 0