Oil extends losses on reserve release, Wall Street’s inflation bet, and claims data due.
Price control
President Joe Biden’s push for major oil-consuming nations to release crude from their reserves is showing some signs of success. China announced it was set to tap stockpiles, with the announcement sending the price of crude lower. A barrel of West Texas Intermediate was trading below $78 as investors waited on whether the U.S. would follow with a similar announcement. Biden is also focused on gasoline prices for consumers, urging the Federal Trade Commission to probe possible illegal conduct in the market saying there is “mounting evidence of anti-consumer behavior.” Some U.S. lawmakers are seizing on the high price of crude to revive legislation that would subject the OPEC cartel to antitrust laws.
Inflation bets
Biden is not the only person under pressure from the inflation outlook. A legion of Wall Street analysts who have spent most of their careers with little to worry about from inflation are now having to make possibly career-defining calls on what will happen next. The Federal Reserve policy outlook remains uncertain. This morning JPMorgan Chase & Co. became the latest big bank to jettison their call that the central bank would remain on hold through 2022, with economists there now predicting a hike in September of next year. Investors, meanwhile, continue to wait for news on who will be the next chair of the Fed.
Claims
One of the arguments that JPMorgan strategists cite for their new call on rates is that they see the Fed fulfilling its employment mandate sooner than they previously expected. Today’s weekly jobless claims data at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time is expected to show further progress in that direction, with the number of people signing up for benefits falling to 260,000, which would be a fresh post-pandemic low. Meanwhile, economic orthodoxy is getting trashed as ever in Turkey. The central bank this morning reduced its one-week repo rate by 100 basis points to 15%, despite consumer inflation running close to 20%.
Markets quiet
It’s turning into another relatively quiet session in global equity markets as investors remain unperturbed about inflation. Overnight the MSCI Asia Pacific Index slipped 0.4% while the Topix index closed 0.1% lower. In Europe the Stoxx 600 Index had dropped 0.1% by 5:50 a.m. with energy companies the biggest losers while travel stocks rebounded from yesterday’s Covid selloff. S&P 500 futures pointed to a small gain at the open, the 10-year Treasury yield was at 1.601% and gold was lower.
Coming up...
The November Philadelphia Fed Outlook accompanies claims data at 8:30 a.m. Kansas City Fed Manufacturing is at 11:00 a.m. The U.S. sells $14 billion 10-year TIPS at 1:00 p.m. Regional Fed presidents Raphael Bostic, John Williams, Charles Evans and Mary Daly all speak at various events today. Macy's Inc., Kohl's Corp., Palo Alto Networks Inc. and Applied Materials Inc. are among the companies reporting results.
What we've been reading
Here's what caught our eye over the last 24 hours.
And finally, here’s what Joe’s interested in this morning
I have a few random things on my mind this morning.
1. The first is that the John Deere strike appears to have been a huge success for workers.
From my Bloomberg colleague Joe Deaux:
The deal, which follows two other failed ones, is a six-year contract that will increase worker wages by 10% in the first year and then 5% in the third and fifth years. A 3% bonus will be paid in the even years of the contract based on prior-year earnings, and each worker will receive an $8,500 signing bonus.
This is one of the powers of tight labor markets.
2. Oil has been falling lately. West Texas is back below $80.
3. The Citi Surprise Index for the U.S. is up and up. Data, on net, is solidly beating expectations again after having briefly gone negative.
4. As of right now, the Atlanta Fed's GDPNowcast is for 8.2% fourth-quarter growth.
5. I have piece coming out in BusinessWeek tomorrow. I won't spoil it now. But it's partly a response to the intensifying criticism of the Fed's current strategy. Numerous pundits -- today it's Martin Wolf at the FT -- are criticizing the Flexible Average Inflation Targeting Framework on the grounds that it doesn't make sense to deliberately make a mistake (higher inflation) to fix another mistake (lower inflation).
However, it's not clear to me that this is what the Fed's new framework (unveiled in August 2020 at Jackson Hole) is actually trying to accomplish. If the Fed could "deliberately target" anything, it wouldn't have all the challenges it's had.
So better to characterize the new strategy as not deliberately trying to overshoot, but in being willing to tolerate an overshoot. There's a big difference between aiming for hotter-than-normal inflation and being willing to tolerate hotter-than-normal inflation.
Follow Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal on Twitter @TheStalwart
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November 18, 2021 at 06:34PM
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