Fed Watch: More Confirmation of Steady Monetary Policy

Green shoots – or, as President Obama says – the beginning of the end of the recession aside, the Fed will not be ready to reverse their accommodative policy stance anytime soon. New York Federal Reserve President William Dudley said as much in a speech today:

If the recovery does, in fact, turn out to be lackluster, the unemployment rate is likely to remain elevated and capacity utilization rates unusually low for some time to come. This suggests that inflation will be quiescent. For all these reasons, concern about “when” the Fed will exit from its current accommodative monetary policy stance is, in my view, very premature.

The Fed continues to expect that low levels of resource utilization will keep a lid on inflation. While some might object that emerging market economies can have both weak growth and high inflation, those economies still have an important transmission mechanism between higher prices and higher wages that appears to be missing in the US. Indeed, while the press focused on the old news “recession is ending” angle of the Beige Book, the money quote for policymakers was:

The weakness of labor markets has virtually eliminated upward wage pressure, and wages and compensation are steady or falling in most Districts; however, Boston cited some manufacturing and business services firms raising pay selectively, and Minneapolis said wage increases were moderate. Boston, Cleveland, Richmond, Chicago, Dallas, and San Francisco cited a range of methods firms are using to limit compensation, including cutting or freezing wages or benefit contributions, deferral of future salary increases, trimming bonuses and travel allowances, reducing hours, temporary shutdowns, periodic furloughs, and unpaid vacations.

Until economic growth is sufficient to propel wages upward, any residual price pressures are likely to be snuffed out by deteriorating real wage growth. Will the job market improve anytime soon? We get a fresh look at initial unemployment claims tomorrow morning, but the July consumer confidence report from the Conference Board indicates that households see a deteriorating jobs picture:

The share of consumers who said jobs are plentiful dropped to 3.6 percent, the lowest level since February 1983. The proportion of people who said jobs are hard to get climbed to 48.1 percent from 44.8 percent.

Lacking a story that leads to strong wage growth in the near – or even medium – term, the Fed is almost certainly on hold at least through this year and likely well into 2010, allowing the size of the balance sheet to adjust according to the needs of the financial markets while keeping interest rates at rock bottom levels. That doesn’t mean all that easy money will not show up somewhere – technical analysts are looking for US equities to explode on the basis of recent market action. But will the Fed lean against such an explosion without clear and convincing evidence that the labor market is poised for strong, sustainable improvement? I doubt it – and for those looking for it, therein lies the ingredients for making the next big bubble.

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