Note: I am travelling in Asia until April 24. Limited equipment and different time zones will limit the frequency and depth of my postings.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell Dials Back Expectations on Interest-Rate Cuts Inflation and hiring have been firmer than expected this year, weakening the case for pre-emptive rate reductions.

Firm inflation during the first quarter has called into question whether the Federal Reserve will be able to lower interest rates this year without signs of an unexpected economic slowdown, Chair Jerome Powell said Tuesday.

His remarks indicated a clear shift in the Fed’s outlook following a third consecutive month of stronger-than-anticipated inflation readings, which derailed hopes that the central bank might be able to deliver pre-emptive rate cuts this summer. Officials had previously said they were looking for greater confidence that inflation was returning to their target and were optimistic another month or two of data might meet that standard.

“The recent data have clearly not given us greater confidence and instead indicate that it is likely to take longer than expected to achieve that confidence,” Powell said at a moderated question-and-answer session in Washington. The remarks were his first public comments since an inflation report last week sent stocks sliding as investors recalibrated their rate-cut expectations. (…)

Powell indicated Tuesday the Fed wasn’t considering rate increases, either. Instead, Powell said officials would leave rates at their current level “as long as needed” if inflation proved more stubborn. He also said the Fed would be prepared to cut rates if the economy was slowing sharply.

“We think policy is well positioned to handle the risks that we face,” Powell said. “Right now, given the strength of the labor market and progress on inflation so far, it’s appropriate to allow restrictive policy further time to work.” (…)

Powell’s comments suggest the central bank will now need to see several more monthly inflation readings to regain the confidence that they had been looking for, effectively delaying rate cuts until later in the year and underscoring the difficulty of achieving a so-called soft landing. (…)

Powell in recent months has approvingly cited signs that labor market imbalances are easing. By maintaining that message on Tuesday, Powell suggested the Fed was only partially resetting its outlook.

A continued slowdown in wage growth is a likely requirement for policymakers to remain confident that inflation will improve over time. Wage pressures “continue to moderate, albeit gradually,” Powell said.

What If Fed Rate Hikes Are Actually Sparking US Economic Boom? A radical theory is spreading as economy defies expectations

(…) In other words, maybe the economy isn’t booming despite higher rates but rather because of them.

It’s an idea so radical that in mainstream academic and financial circles, it borders on heresy — the sort of thing that in the past only Turkey’s populist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or the most zealous disciples of Modern Monetary Theory would dare utter publicly.

But the new converts — along with a handful who confess to being at least curious about the idea — say the economic evidence is becoming impossible to ignore. By some key gauges — GDP, unemployment, corporate profits — the expansion now is as strong or even stronger than it was when the Federal Reserve first began lifting rates.

This is, the contrarians argue, because the jump in benchmark rates from 0% to over 5% is providing Americans with a significant stream of income from their bond investments and savings accounts for the first time in two decades. “The reality is people have more money,” says Kevin Muir, a former derivatives trader at RBC Capital Markets who now writes an investing newsletter called The MacroTourist.

These people — and companies — are in turn spending a big enough chunk of that new-found cash, the theory goes, to drive up demand and goose growth. (…)

Muir and the rest of the contrarians — Greenlight Capital’s David Einhorn is the most high profile of them — say it’s different this time for a few reasons. Principal among them is the impact of exploding US budget deficits. The government’s debt has ballooned to $35 trillion, double what it was just a decade ago. That means those higher interest rates it’s now paying on the debt translate into an additional $50 billion or so flowing into the pockets of American (and foreign) bond investors each month. (…)

Einhorn notes that US households receive income on more than $13 trillion of short-term interest-bearing assets, almost triple the $5 trillion in consumer debt, excluding mortgages, that they have to pay interest on. At today’s rates, that translates to a net gain for households of some $400 billion a year, he estimates. (…)

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, spoke for the traditionalists when he called the new theory simply “off base.” But even Zandi acknowledges that “higher rates are doing less economic damage than in times past.”

Like the converts, he cites another key factor for this resilience: Many Americans managed to lock in uber-low rates on their mortgages for 30 years during the pandemic, shielding them from much of the pain caused by rising rates. (This is a crucial difference with the rest of the world; mortgage rates rapidly adjust higher as benchmark rates rise in many developed nations.) (…)

I am not an economist, so I don’t have any theory. But I observe.

In April 2023, I wrote in Reacceleration:

• Public responses to the pandemic continue to influence the economy. Rising inflation and higher interest rates did not meaningfully impact consumer spending. Goods consumption has only flatlined and remains 6% above trend while services are slowly catching up but are still 1.7% below trend.
• The widely forecast U.S. recession has failed to materialize so far as the economy experienced rolling recessions in housing (strong) and goods production (mild) offset by recovering services.
• So, in an economy where goods now weigh half as much as services, goods-biased indicators can be misleading when services and employment stay reasonably firm.
• U.S. manufacturing employment keeps rising and could actually grow in 2023 helping sustain related services employment (e.g. transportation, restaurants, banking). KKR says that “in 2022 U.S. companies have revealed plans to reshore nearly 350,000 jobs, compared to 110,000 in 2019.”
• As I wrote in December, if KKR is right on reshoring and employers keep hanging on to their scarce employees, this could well be a soft landing after all. And here we are, 4 months later, with indications that manufacturing, far from crashing, is now about to contribute to growth, perhaps significantly given that supply chains have normalized, inventories are very low, labor supply is improving and consumer demand remains reasonably solid.
• Reshoring and nationalistic policies would only add fuel to this nascent fire. Keep in mind that manufacturing carries more economic pull than its weight suggests: high salaries and important collateral effects on many services such as transportation, restaurants and banking act as economic multipliers.
• So, if no major banking crisis, the Fed may well get its soft landing.

In September, in The Wealth Defect:

• At their core, American consumers are rational animals. They enjoy consuming but, over time, they spend what they earn. When they did not, it was either because of difficulties/uncertainty (e.g. recessions) or because their rapidly rising net worth allowed for splurging thanks to realized capital gains or increased borrowings against rising asset values. The chart below illustrate these trends. When  inflation-adjusted household net worth rose rapidly above trend like in the late 1990s, the mid-2000s and recently, expenditures grew faster than income. [The savings rate declined. The chart is updated to the latest data.]

• The Fed’s policies boosted household wealth 15.5% above their 2019 level and 35% above trend. Thanks to rising stock prices but, principally, to rising home values due to unusually low supply of existing homes due to Fed-supplied mortgage handcuffs.
• As much as it wants to reduce demand, the Fed is running against cratering [housing] supply by its own doing. Meanwhile, sales of new one-family houses jumped 27% in the past 12 months. Talk about mortgage rate sensitivity!
• From a monetary policy perspective, the wealth effect is now a wealth defect: rising interest rates have little impact on a very wealthy, under leveraged, consumer looking to enjoy life AMAP (as much as possible) post pandemic.
• Oddly enough, given interest rates relative impotence (sic), it may be that only rising oil/energy costs could dampen overall demand sufficiently for the Fed to achieve its targets. Would it be enough? Great buy-side strategists such as KKR’s Henry McVey, Fiera Capital’s Jean-Guy Desjardins and RBA’s Richard Bernstein think that demand is too resilient and that the Fed will need to do more or that inflation will rest at a higher level than most investors expect.

In December, in Slowing, Really?

• Stronger employment growth along with rising hours and accelerating wage gains propelled aggregate weekly payrolls up 0.75% after 0.0% in October. Averaging the last 2 months, the 4.6% annualized rate is only slightly weaker than the previous 3-month average of +5.0%. On a YoY basis, labor income is up 5.4% in November, up from 4.9% in October, suggesting steady, if not accelerating consumer spending given CPI and PCE inflation of 3.2% and 3.0% respectively in October.
• In a December 6 interview with CNBC, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon (who gets daily sales data every morning) said “I expected more softness by this time of the year than we’re actually experiencing” and “the volume of our nonfood sales are starting to come back”.
• In November, 532,000 Americans entered the labor force; all of them presumably found a job given the 747,000 jump in the household survey employment level that led to the sharp drop in the unemployment rate.
• The other surprise is the sharp decline in energy prices owing to the unexpected jump in U.S. production. Gasoline prices are back to their October 2022 lows, freeing significant disposable dollars and reducing cost pressures economy-wide but particularly for service providers.

That said, I also wrote 2 months ago American Exceptionalism: Don’t Extrapolate:

• One additional source of growth has emerged since 2008: the U.S. government has significantly intervened in the economy, boosting its expenditures from 21% of GDP to its current 25.5%, doing so with borrowed capital as opposed to higher revenues. The jump in leverage since the GFC has been nothing short of spectacular: the federal public debt exploded from 62% of GDP in 2007 to 120%, in 15 years!
• The American stars (and stripes) neatly aligned themselves after the 2008-09 GFC. The federal budget exploded under both Democrat and Republican governments (R.I.P. the Tea Party) while interest rates were brought to zero. Corporate tax rates were drastically cut in 2018. The pandemic prompted the U.S. government to further boost spending and the Fed to flood the economy with liquidity. Americans merrily spent their pandemic bounty. Meanwhile, broken trade channels and the trade dispute with China are inciting businesses to reshore production, encouraged by significant government subsidies and increased protectionism. Manufacturing construction doubled (+$110B) since mid-2022, ten times faster than GDP, while manufacturing shipments and new orders stagnated. Actually, manufacturers spent twice more building plants in 2022-23 than during all previous 20 years.
• Looking ahead, many important changes are likely:
• Consumer spending will normalize, with increased volatility. Since 1959, the personal savings rate has only been lower than the current 3.7% during the 2005-08 period when Americans splurged on housing, and briefly in 2022, in total only 7% of the time. Before the pandemic, the savings rate ranged between 5.0% and 8.5%.
• Construction spending will also normalize. Since 2010, total construction spending grew 50% faster than GDP, carrying a high economic multiplier.
• Government spending ex-interest expense will measurably slow down.
• The unemployment rate is at a historical low. Employment growth will slow.
• American politics are getting increasingly toxic and inefficient.
• Investors are paying top valuations for large cap stocks, clearly extrapolating the past without appreciating that the true American exceptionalism actually is all the exceptional factors that boosted its economy since 2009 and oblivious to the rising risk from its indebtedness as interest rates normalize.

It took less than 2 weeks for the bumps on the road to kick Mr. Powell off the wagon. Even before getting his favored PCE inflation data.  On April 3rd, before the March CPI, he said: “The recent data do not…materially change the overall picture, which continues to be one of solid growth, a strong but rebalancing labor market, and inflation moving down to 2% on a sometimes bumpy path.”

I don’t know if the retail sales data, or the almost unanimous “too strong” reaction, had anything to do, but why hurry to reset expectations so radically?

I did not see the retail sales data so strong (Roaring Lion???) and the labor market is indeed “strong and rebalancing”. February’s job openings were about unchanged from January but Indeed job postings have since declined 3.2% through April 11.

Goldman Sachs’ Jan Hatzius:

Despite the recent upside inflation surprises, we think the broader disinflationary narrative remains intact. One key reason is that the labor market continues to rebalance nicely. Our jobs-workers gap is down to 2.0 million, the quits rate is below pre-pandemic levels, and the wage news remains favorable. As of March, average hourly earnings and the Atlanta Fed wage growth tracker are consistent with year-on-year wage growth of just over 4%, and we expect the more reliable employment cost index to show a similar pace for Q1. Over the next year, we see wage growth converging to 3.5%, the pace we estimate is consistent with 2% assuming a productivity trend of 1.5% and stable profit margins.

Most everybody were expecting a rate cut in June or later. Why the rush Mr. Powell? A bumpy road also has potholes. Here’s a visible one:

Business Leaders Survey Covering service firms in New York State, northern New Jersey and southwestern Connecticut

Activity remained steady in the region’s service sector, according to firms responding to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s April 2024 Business Leaders Survey. The survey’s headline business activity index was little changed at -0.6. The business climate index rose seven points to -19.0, suggesting the business climate remains worse than normal, though to a lesser extent than in recent months. Employment inched just slightly higher, and wage increases moderated. Input price increases were little changed, while selling price increases slowed modestly.

How California’s Huge Raises for Fast-Food Workers Will Ripple Across Industries Fed must take heed of California pay increase, economists say

Michaela Mendelsohn, who owns six El Pollo Loco locations serving grilled chicken and tacos in California, recently found herself raising managers’ pay by over 10% to more than $83,000 a year.

With the state’s new law mandating a $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers taking effect April 1, a separate rule requiring salaried staff to earn double the minimum wage has triggered a chain reaction.

“They’ve gotten a big pay increase,” Mendelsohn said of her managers, who had typically made just over $70,000 a year. (…)

The law is already creating spillover effects from janitors to hotel cleaners, as well as higher-paid workers within the fast-food business.

That’s just the start. As many as 5 million of the state’s low-wage workers, both in fast food and adjacent industries not covered by the law, could also get raises, according to Bloomberg Economics. Given California’s huge population — No. 1 in the country — that would amount to about 3% of the entire US workforce. (…)

There are early indications that pay raises are spreading from fast-food joints to other California employers. School cafeteria workers in Sacramento will be paid $20 an hour come July, a raise spurred in part by anticipated competition for labor from restaurant workers, a move reported earlier by the Associated Press. (…)

“The floor has been lifted,” he said. “Lower-wage workers across the board are saying, ‘We deserve the same.’” (…)

Price increases are another big way the new law’s effects are rippling through the economy, which is adding to inflationary pressures for consumers. McDonald’s franchisee Scott Rodrick, whose 18 restaurants are mostly in the San Francisco area, has raised prices between 5% and 7%. (…)

At California locations of Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc., the price of a chicken burrito or bowl averaged $10.27 as of April 3, up from $9.50 on March 29, KeyBanc Capital Markets said in a report. Prices at Burger King rose about 2% from February to early April while Wendy’s started charging about 8% more, according to Kalinowski Equity Research, which surveyed 25 locations of each chain. (…)

Note: I am travelling in Asia until April 24. Limited equipment and different time zones will limit the frequency and depth of my postings.

In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lion for March Retail Sales

Retail sales handily exceeded expectations, rising 0.7% in March, and excluding autos, sales rose 1.1%, the biggest monthly pop in over a year. The better-than-expected gains are even more remarkable given the sharp upward revisions to the February data. The initial 0.3% gain in retail sales ex-autos was doubled to 0.6% in the March release.

There were a few factors that could be lifting the sales figures starting with the timing of Easter. The earlier than usual timing of the holiday may have pulled some spending into March that in other years might have occurred in April. To the extent that this was at play we could anticipate some payback in April.

Another boost came from ecommerce. The 2.7% jump in online retail was the biggest gain for any category in March and also the largest sequential increase in 27 months. Amazon hosted a “Big Spring Sale” March 20-25. It is not uncommon for other retailers to run competing promotions concurrent with Amazon’s and that too may have been a factor underpinning the non-store category in March.

Source: U.S. Department of Commerce and Wells Fargo Economics

Sales growth was mixed elsewhere. Grocery stores (+0.5%) and restaurants (+0.4%) saw similar gains in sales last month, but over the past year, restaurants continue to outpace grocery sales by a wide margin exhibiting the only slow normalization in behavior.

Higher prices also boosted sales estimates. Gasoline sales saw a 2.1% pop in sales, but with the retail sales data reported nominally, or not adjusted for inflation, higher prices at the pump lifted these nominal sales figures last month. Previously released data on vehicle sales foreshadowed the 0.7% pullback in sales of motor vehicles and parts in March, and even as households face the highest financing rates in decades, vehicle sales remain decent—auto sales were up 2.8% at a year-ago rate in March.

The same can’t be said for housing-related demand. Sales at furniture and building material & supply stores remain weak. While that’s in part due to demand being pulled forward during the pandemic and less remodeling activity taking place today, it’s also indicative of the higher-rate environment. On a year-ago basis, furniture sales were down for 16 of the past 18 straight months, while building material sales have slid for a full year. (…)

To that end, broader control group sales (sales excluding restaurants, autos, gasoline and building materials) leaped 1.1% in March, which came on top of upward revisions to past month’s data as well. Control group sales feed into the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ calculation of real goods spending in GDP accounting, and today’s data present some decent upside risk to our estimate for broader real personal consumption expenditures to advance at a 2.3% annualized rate in Q1. Our calculation of inflation-adjusted control group sales rose at an annualized rate of 3.0% in Q1.

(…) This morning’s consumption data continue to tell us not to underestimate this consumer. That’s good for growth, but could be a problem for the Fed trying to cool inflation.

What about this lion? In truth, it’s been quite erratic lately and spending on goods has become detached from labor income growth.

This next chart shows MoM growth rates: strong sales through October, a weak year-end and a big bounce in February-March.

Ed Yardeni:

The US economy is still flying high. That’s because consumers didn’t get the recession memo. They keep spending because real disposable income is rising, more Americans are retiring and have the means to do so comfortably, and six million or more “newcomers” are consuming here rather than south of the border.

Lions are dangerous when at short range. Taking a few steps back for a better assessment, let’s look at quarterly sales trends: Q3’23: +7.0% annualized, Q4’23: +2.4% a.r., Q1’24: +0.2% a.r..

Is the lion falling asleep?

January was very weak, bad weather. February bounced back, good weather, but really only made up for January.

March? Did the early Easter and the Amazon sale create the illusion of strength?

This chart shows total sales less non-store retailers, MoM. March “store sales” rose 0.3% after 5 months when sales actually declined 0.5% in total. Seasonally adjusted “store sales” are 0.2% below their September 2023 level.

Same chart, quarterly: not a roaring lion, is it?

Total sales are actually only 0.6% above their September 2023 level.

I am not ready to go fully against the bullish lion watchers but I fail to see accelerating spending. Aggregate payrolls are rising 2.0-2.5% YoY in real terms, so is real spending.

As an iffy proxy for real excess savings, real deposits are back on trend. Spending should normalize.

China Home Sales Drought Persists With Little Recovery Sign

The value of new-home sales from the 100 biggest real estate companies slid about 46% from a year earlier to 358 billion yuan ($49.6 billion), following a 60% decline in February, according to preliminary data from China Real Estate Information Corp. (…)

Country Garden Holdings Co., once a powerhouse in the residential space, made a surprise announcement late Thursday that it will miss a deadline for reporting annual results. China Vanke Co., at one time the largest listed developer, said net income tumbled 46% last year, sliding more than analysts expected.

March is traditionally a quick period for home sales, surging 93% from February, but sales were still weaker than the monthly average in the third and fourth quarters of last year, according to CRIC.

Separate figures released Monday showed a mixed picture for home prices in China. Prices of new homes gained 0.27% in March, accelerating from 0.14% in February, China Index Holdings data showed. From a year earlier, they climbed 0.82%.

In the second-hand market, however, prices fell 0.56% from a month earlier and 4.8% on year, according to the report, which tracked values in 100 major cities. (…)

Property market weakness has prompted Fitch Ratings to downgrade the credit rating of some builders into junk territory, including Vanke and Longfor Group Holdings Ltd.

Fitch Ratings on Thursday also cut forecasts for the housing market, and now expects a 5%-10% fall in new home sales this year amid weaker home-buying demand. The ratings firm previously estimated a 0%-5% decline.

Apple Faces Worst iPhone Slump Since Covid as Rivals Rise Global smartphone market rebounded in first quarter, IDC says

Apple Inc.’s iPhone shipments slid a worse-than-projected nearly 10% in the quarter ended in March, reflecting flagging sales in China despite a broader smartphone industry rebound.

The company shipped 50.1 million iPhones in the first three months of the year, according to market tracker IDC, falling shy of the 51.7 million average analyst estimate compiled by Bloomberg. The 9.6% year-on-year drop is the steepest for Apple since Covid lockdowns snarled supply chains in 2022, the researchers said.

The Cupertino, California-based iPhone maker has struggled to sustain sales in China since the debut of its latest model in September. The resurgence of rivals from Huawei Technologies Co. to Xiaomi Corp. and a Beijing-imposed ban on foreign devices in the workplace have all weighed on sales. The IDC data provides the first snapshot of the global performance of Apple’s most important product ahead of earnings on May 2.

The drop in iPhone shipments is significant given the overall mobile market registered its best growth in years. Smartphone makers shipped 289.4 million handsets in the period, marking a 7.8% rise from the trough of a year ago, when many manufacturers were grappling with a surfeit of unsold devices. Samsung Electronics Co. regained the top spot in the March quarter, while budget-focused Transsion increased shipments by 85% and Xiaomi bounced back to close the gap on second-place Apple. (…)

Average selling prices for handsets are rising, as consumers increasingly opt for premium models that they intend to hold on to for longer, IDC’s researchers found. Apple, which consistently maintains the highest ASP in the industry, has led the way in this, with consumers showing a distinct preference for its higher-tier models. Still, the company has this year resorted to unusual discounts to spur sales, with some retail partners in China taking as much as $180 off the regular price. (…)

Here’s What Higher for Longer Means for the Stock Market  Stocks are still trading near record levels, but some investors say further gains may be more difficult to come by.

(…) Higher yields make stocks less attractive than holding Treasurys to maturity, and they increase borrowing costs across the economy for everything from corporate debt to mortgages to car loans.

“It changes the math,” said Quincy Krosby, chief global strategist for LPL Financial. “You have to recalibrate, you have to adjust, and the rate regime must be in concert with where the valuations are.” (…)

Small-caps, which tend to derive most of their revenue from inside the U.S., are especially sensitive to the trajectory of the economy.

One big reason: Small stocks generally devote a much larger share of operating profit to covering interest on debt than larger ones do. The ratio of operating income to interest expense within the S&P 600 was 2.3 times as of March, according to Dow Jones Market Data. That compares with 7.6 times for S&P 500 companies.

They generally issue more floating-rate debt than bigger companies, so their loan payments fluctuate with benchmark interest rates. When rates go up, that means higher interest expenses dent their bottom lines and leave them more at risk of defaults.

About 44% of debt among companies within the Russell 2000, another small-cap index, was floating-rate at the end of last year, compared with 10% for the S&P 500, according to data from Lazard Asset Management.

Adding to the crunch: About 40% of the companies in the Russell 2000 didn’t turn a profit over the past year, compared with 10% in the S&P 500, according to J.P. Morgan Asset Management. (…)

Higher interest rates propel depositors to move money to Treasurys and money-market funds for higher returns, contributing to lower deposits at banks. Meanwhile, banks have had to shell out more interest to yield-hungry depositors, particularly hurting the bottom line at small and midsize banks.

Wells Fargo said Friday it expects net interest income, or profit from lending, to decline by 7% to 9% in 2024.

Delinquency rates could also creep higher if interest rates remain high, which could increase loan losses for banks.

Higher interest rates have also pushed up mortgage rates back toward 7%, a level they haven’t seen since December. That has kept many would-be home buyers on the sidelines, leading to sharp declines in mortgage activity at the big banks, a source of revenue.

The S&P 500’s real-estate sector is down 8.8% this year, the worst performer of the 11 segments and the only group in the red.

The rate whipsaw has hit smaller banks harder than big ones. The KBW Nasdaq Bank Index, which includes heavyweights such as JPMorgan, has advanced 2.5% this year, while an index of regional banking stocks is down 14%. (…)