Here Comes Powell But Draghi And Kuroda Strangely Absent From Jackson Hole

While political turmoil may have preoccupied the market for most of this week, the market’s focus for today and into Saturday will turn back to monetary policy with the Fed’s annual Jackson Hole symposium due to kick off today and continue into the weekend.

As DB’s Jim Reid reminds us, the topic of this year’s conference is the rather vague “Changing Market Structure and Implications for Monetary Policy” and what it means for competition, consumers and workers if a a few superstar firms such as Amazon.com control ever-larger market shares in many industries. Amazon chief economist Patrick Bajari has been invited, perhaps to give some color on why “superstar” firms account for 60% of profit margin growth in the past 20 years.

Fed Chair Powell is due to speak this afternoon at 10.00am EDT (link to full program here) on the even more vague “Monetary Policy in a Changing Economy”.

Powell has been a regular attendee since joining the Fed’s board as a governor in 2012, but this will be his first appearance since becoming the Fed’s leader in February. While Powell isn’t likely to say anything about it, his public appearance will be the first since President Trump criticized the Fed’s campaign to raise interest rates, first last month and also last week when he told donors he hoped Powell wouldn’t disappoint him.

One notable feature of this year’s central bank outing is that as Bloomberg notes, Powell won’t be kept company by his European Central Bank and Bank of Japan counterparts at this year’s Jackson Hole policy symposium, with Mario Draghi and Haruhiko Kuroda’s names both missing from the list of attendees. In fact, it appears that the ECB is boycotting the event altogether, as none of the ECB’s executive board members will make the trip to the central banker gathering in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park. That said, appearances by Carstens, the former head of Mexico’s central bank, and BOC’s Poloz will provide an opportunity for international perspectives on the Trump administration’s aggressive trade posture.