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Three Rate-Cut Questions For The Fed
Three Rate-Cut Questions For The Fed
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Unhedged’s idea hopper is running on empty. Help us replenish it:
robert.armstrong@ft.com and ethan.wu@ft.com.
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12/12/23, 9:35 PM Three rate-cut questions for the Fed
This sort of policy normalisation, lowering nominal rates to hold real rates steady
as inflation falls, makes sense. But there are loads of questions around how it will
work in practice. Here are three we are thinking about.
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12/12/23, 9:35 PM Three rate-cut questions for the Fed
2 What sort of inflation counts? Fed officials have said they want to
see moderation in each of three inflation categories: goods, rents (the
biggest category) and non-housing services. The reality of falling
inflation and/or rising unemployment might change that. Prices of
non-housing core services make up less than a quarter of the total
inflation basket, and some, such as auto insurance, have been
unusually, persistently hot. Would inflation in a few services categories
keep the Fed from lowering rates even if unemployment was inching
up and core inflation falling? Either way, “we have to have more clarity
about what [types of inflation the Fed] is comfortable with”, says Kevin
Gordon at Schwab.
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12/12/23, 9:35 PM Three rate-cut questions for the Fed
Without its five largest names, the S&P 500’s quarterly EPS has fallen
1.5% in 3Q y/y, according to Bloomberg Intelligence — even with better
than expected results. Compare that with the index’s overall growth
rate of 4%
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12/12/23, 9:35 PM Three rate-cut questions for the Fed
I was a little surprised by this, given how strong the economy was through the end
of the third quarter. And it got me thinking about how much we should care if we
are in a profits recession. The point of the Bloomberg piece, as I understood it, was
that outside of the five biggest companies by market capitalisation (Apple,
Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Nvidia) S&P 500 profits are falling, and this
should make us wonder about the sustainability of the current rally. But it also has
implications for the economy: it likely reflects something about the ability of
companies to raise prices, pay workers, invest in new projects and so on.
I did a little measuring myself, but differently from Bloomberg in two ways. First, I
used sequential rather than year-over-year changes in earnings. I wanted to match
the way we talk about economic recessions, for which the common narrow
definition is two quarters of sequential declines in output. Sequential change is also
a more immediate measure of economic momentum (though it does create the risk
of seasonal distortion). And I also used net income, or more precisely net income
adjusted for unusual items, rather than net earnings per share (my numbers come
from S&P Capital IQ). I wanted to look past the effects of stock buybacks on EPS,
so I could see changes in companies’ underlying profitability without the impact of
changes to capital structures.
The data is fiddly, and there is not a canonical answer to the question “is US
corporate profitability rising or falling?”. The closest thing is probably the national
accounts compiled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis; these also show modest
but positive sequential growth in profit after tax in the past few quarters.
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12/12/23, 9:35 PM Three rate-cut questions for the Fed
That said, another way to see that we are not in a profits recession: only 68
companies in the S&P had profits fall sequentially in both of the past two quarters.
The list of companies in “profit recession” contains companies from 10 of the 11
major sectors (communications services was the exception), but there was not an
obvious or menacing macroeconomic pattern to be found in the list, other than a
few sectoral trends (eg, transport companies are struggling; liability-sensitive
regional banks are under margin pressure).
Profits, like the economy, are slowing. But we are not, however you slice it, in a
profits recession.
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