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we have not seen an era without federally introduced spending without federally introduced forms of quantitative easing since the great financial crisis so we have been propping up our economy for 14 years straight now so we have distorted the prices of bonds and fixed income we've distorted the prices of equities we've pro we've created an asset bubble in crypto out of nowhere and now we have to do the hard work of figuring out what the real supply demand is in the economy and we took six quarters here there's six quarters of just massive gdp spike there from the preceding quarters and we have two down quarters is it going to take six quarters to wash us out or longer i guess no longer because what david said is now making the problem even worse so because powell was catering to whatever pressure he's been getting and he must be getting some severe pressure from the white house those were really dubbish comments but what is the problem when he is dovish well the practical reality is a couple of things number one is typically the yields of long dated bonds go down that essentially tells everybody else to reprice assets what does that practically do it makes the cost of borrowing roughly cheaper okay it makes the price of equities particularly ones that are far out on the risk spectrum so specifically let's focus on nasdaq and crypto right tech stocks biotech stocks and crypto stocks go up much more aggressively so what has powell effectively done he has synthetically created a form of easing again right like his job at the federal reserve if you think about the money supply as a pipe it's to shrink the pipe to close off demand to get things in equilibrium so even though he's doing this by the language that he's doing he's effectively allowing market participants to basically guess that the worst is over and now we're going to start to expand the pipe again and so they go to the end state so what he effectively did in one speech is basically put a pin at the end of this year and is telling the markets i'm mostly going to be done and if anything i'm probably going to be cutting in the back half of 23 go on your merry way it's now pushing the problem out another eight quarters like we need to stop this nonsense he needs to be definitive and he needs to fundamentally break the back of inflation so that you find out what the true demand is in the economy people are really fixated on these numbers without understanding uh basic statistics so just taking a step back if you go to the bureau of economic analysis which is an official website of the government of the united states that posts gdp the title makes it pretty self-obvious what we're dealing with here which it says nick you can put it up there real gdp the percent change from the preceding quarter so things can still go up positively but still be negative if it doesn't go up by the same or more than the quarter before it the thing that we really have going on is that over the last eight quarters we've had all kinds of very turbulent data that's made the trend line unpredictable and the most obvious way to see this is actually in one specific sub-sector which we'll get to in a second which is around us e-commerce adoption you see this one huge spike coming out of nowhere and then eventually everything has settled back to trend the same way i think what we're waiting to figure out is how many quarters does it take for us to get back to on-trend growth in the economy we had a massive shortfall in q2 of 2020.
we had a massive surplus in q3 of 2020. we've had a country that's been getting back to finding equilibrium over the last five quarters so we don't really know what the steady state growth should be this is why i specifically had such an issue with the tone the white house took which was trying to explain away this that this isn't a recession by trying to create doubt in the definition instead i think it would have been much better off just repeating what i just said and explaining basic statistics and actually showing that the country is headed in the right direction largely speaking from a really crazy one-time externality that nobody could have predicted that it's going to take some number of quarters and so really what you should look at and jason you've pointed to this is employment and wages and try to be a little bit more circumspect in overreacting to any one quarter of data by the way the fed exactly just said the same thing yesterday when they raised 75 basis points they said we are not going to give guidance anymore because things are too turbulent we're going to remain vigilant on inflation but mostly we're going to be very near term data dependent so i would boil all of this in saying let's not overreact to a quarter's print here or there and specifically the label i think the white house made a mistake in trying to basically think you know we all didn't understand what our technical recession was i think instead we should just focus on what we have to do to get back to solid state equipment we've never in the history of america ever had cpi print above four and a half or five percent without inflation being brought down by having fed funds not also be greater than four and a half or five percent at some point inflation will turn over and we'll print six and seven percent but that's still not below four and a half or five and right now our target fed funds rate is between 2.25 and 2.5 percent so we could still be only 50 of the way there if inflation remains at four to four to five percent and this is what i think market participants don't want to hear they don't want to hear that there has to be a meaningful form of tightening and politicians don't want to hear that the white house for sure doesn't want me here the problem is that if powell caters to too much of that feedback he's not going to do what he's supposed to do and why he's put in that job the reality is we do not want pal tightening more than he should or more than is necessary to solve inflation because it will cause a serious recession so i think we're we're caught between two pretty bad options here and it's because i think that what happened last year contributed to this i mean look if you go back to that chart that you just showed what happened in q2 of 2020 we had a very healthy economy going into 2020 in 2019 right and then in q2 of 2020 we had kovid but we made the situation even worse with lockdowns and we basically shut down the whole economy brought it back at least in most states in q3 and then the feds started printing and congress started printing 10 trillion dollars well still by last year the economy was back we had something like 5.7 percent annualized growth this year it's negative why is that i mean this may be the lingering effect of all that stimulus but i do think that the administration made it worse by sending checks into an overheated economy they also created energy scarcity i'm not saying the white house isn't without fault david but i do think that if all of these geniuses could have actually just taken a simple econ and stats 101 class and explained how year-over-year measurements work to the american people i think they're smart enough to understand it we didn't have to go down this convoluted route we could have just explained we put a lot of excess money in the economy we don't yet know what the full effect of that is we need to let that wash through in the meantime you're going to see some crazy numbers from time to time and we just have to be patient and the other crazy things you're going to have looking at second and third order um effects is all these downstream effects people are making business decisions going into these economies shopify just laid off 10 of its workforce about a thousand people on tuesday their stock is down 10 past five days overall 70 year-to-date um and if you look at this chart and and toby uh took blame for this he basically said listen we thought that this was going to be a uh you know fast forward into the future that people would adopt e-commerce in a major way and that would stick here's u.s e-commerce adoption growth rate massive spike when people were forced to buy all their goods online and now it is regressing to the mean i mean mean reversion is a if you look at shopify stock if you look at peloton stock if you look at a firm stock if you look at arc you know a lot of these things were trending in a great direction they had this short term crazy behavior in the middle of all of this free money and now they've mean reverted and you know we're in the midst of finding out what the real price
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