Why Ken Fisher Doesn’t Try to Predict the Fed

요약 보기

켄 피셔는 연준(Fed) 등 중앙은행의 정책 방향을 예측하지 않는다고 밝힌다. 연준 의장은 취임 후 모든 것을 잊는다는 마틴의 말을 인용하며, 위원들이 합의에 이르지 못하고 번복도 잦아 예측이 무의미하다고 주장한다. 그는 50년 넘게 연준이 옳은 결정보다 잘못된 결정을 더 많이 했다고 비판해 왔다. 대신 개별 중앙은행이 아닌 주요 중앙은행 전체의 흐름을 함께 보는 것이 더 중요하다고 강조한다. 특정 자산에 대한 가격 예측은 언급하지 않았다.

다듬은 글

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01. So, many people that have paid attention to my commentary over the decades know that I have absolutely no history of forecasting what the Fed, or, for that matter, other central banks of developed nations or the eurozone, do. I'm just not been someone to forecast that. And they sometimes ask, why is it you don't forecast what the fed will do?

02. Everyone else seems to. And the answer is, well, the longest serving head of the fed, who I often quote, William McChesney Martin, somewhat famously said that when you become the head of the fed, you take a little pill and it makes you forget everything you ever knew, and it lasts just as long as you're head of the fed.

03. Remembering that is useful. It's useful when you try to anticipate the head of the fed. But remember also that the Open Market Committee is a 12 member group that has to vote, and they all don't necessarily agree. And there's sometimes disagreements. And the head of the fed, he really has to try to play the role of persuader and leader for the others to get a consensus.

04. But, I've extended Martin's principle to presume that they've all taken that pill. Another way to think about that is if you had a group of chimpanzees in a cage, you wouldn't particularly predict what their behavior is. And at any given point in time, if you think of a bunch of crazy people, you wouldn't particularly predict what their behavior is at a point in time, in my opinion, as a largely career long, over 50 years critic of the fed, thinking that the fed makes wrong moves more often than they do right moves, I don't begin to anticipate what kind of wrong moves they do, because I think it's somewhere between crazy people and chimpanzees in a cage, and there's not a lot more complicated than that.

05. I don't take these people very seriously. I watch what they do and I think about how that impacts the world ahead. But I don't try to predict them because I don't think it makes any sense to try to predict people that are inherently in what they are truly unpredictable. They will do what they think they will do until they don't do it anymore.

06. And one of the features that happens often is, they envision what they think they will do moving ahead, and that becomes public information. But then something happens in the world and that causes them to change their mind completely and do some other thing. And they can decide that on pretty short notice.

07. And so I don't try to move with that prediction. If they do what they previously said they would do, then why try to predict that? So either way, I just think it's a pointless activity. And I think there's many, many, many, many more useful things to focus on when you're trying to figure out where the world's going, how it's evolving, and whether that's about what goes on in Main Street or what goes on on Wall Street, and whether in America or all around the world.

08. I will say finally, and concluding, that I've also long believed for decades and decades that it's really the totality of the world that's important to see, not just one central bank like the Fed. The Fed is, of course, important. And what it does impacts. But so is that true of other major central banks and more importantly, the totality of all the major central banks together. Thank you for listening to me. I hope you found this useful and educational. .