There Is ‘Only One Scenario’ Where Equities Benefit From Here

I’ll tell you what: I would absolutely love to rent out a small auditorium, pack it full of economists and analysts, make it an open bar event (so, all you can drink for free), set the conversation topic to “impact of rising rates on stocks”, lock the all the doors and then watch what happens from the safe confines of an observation deck.

Obviously, this is all anyone wants to talk about these days and it’s clear why. This month’s market turmoil was variously attributed to the above-consensus hourly earnings print that accompanied the January jobs report which, according to the narrative, is a sign that inflation pressures are building (wage growth being one of the missing pieces of the puzzle to this point). More importantly, this debate is taking place against a backdrop of reckless fiscal stimulus, piled atop an economy that’s already running at full employment and then to top things off, we’ve got a rookie Fed chair who, while not necessarily lacking on the credentials front, is by definition untested when it comes to steering the ship.

The ill-timed fiscal stimulus is the fly in the ointment here because it complicates the Fed’s decision calculus and also makes it difficult to decipher what the dollar is doing on any given day (why are people dumping it when rates are rising?, etc.).

The debate has shifted to real rates which appear to be in the driver’s seat for equities at this juncture. Again, this is complicated by the fiscal stimulus discussion (real rates moving higher as the U.S. budget deficit expands on the way to financing Trump’s foray into fiscal insanity) and questions about how the Fed will respond to the likely side effects of implementing expansionary fiscal policy when the economy is already running hot.

In short, this is impossible to tease out definitively. There’s too much going on and the entire effort is complicated immeasurably by the fact that because the post-crisis monetary policy response was unprecedented, we have no way of knowing how the market is likely to respond to the unwind of that policy and as it happens, the U.S. is at the forefront of that unwind with the Fed running down the balance sheet just as Treasury supply ramps up.