March 6, 2017, 4:00pm EST
The last data point for everyone to obsess about going into next week’s Fed meeting will be this Friday’s jobs report.
But as I’ve said for quite a while, the jobs data has been good enough in the Fed’s eyes for quite some time. Nonetheless, they’ve had many, many balks along the path of normalizing rates over the past couple of years. Here’s a look at a chart of the benchmark payrolls data we’ll be seeing Friday.
You can see in this chart, the twelve-month moving average is 195k. The three-month moving average is 182k. The six-month moving average is 182k. This is all fairly consistent with historical/pre-crisis levels.
So the numbers have been solid for quite some time, even meeting and exceeding the Fed’s targets, especially when it comes to the unemployment rate (4.7% last). However, when the Fed’s targets have been met, the Fed has moved the goal posts. When those goal posts were then exceeded, the Fed found new excuses to justify their decisions to avoid the path of aggressive hikes/normalization of rates that they had guided.
Among those excuses: When jobs were trending at 200k and unemployment breached 5%, the Fed started to acknowledge underemployment. Then the lack of wage growth became the focus. Then it was macro issues. To name a few: It’s been soft Chinese economic data, a Chinese currency move, Russian geopolitical tensions, collapsing oil prices, Brexit and weak productivity.
And just prior to the election last year, the Fed became, confusingly, less optimistic about the U.S. economic outlook, which was the justification to ratchet down the aggressive projected path for rates.
I suspected last year, when they did this that they were making a strategic pivot, to set expectations for a much easier path for rates, in hopes to keep people spending, borrowing and investing — instead of promoting a tighter path, which proved for the better part of two years (prior to the election) to create the opposite effect.
Remember, Bernanke (the former Fed Chair) even wrote a public piece on this last August, criticizing the Fed for being too optimistic in its projections for the path of interest rates. By showing the market/the world an expectation that rates will be dramatically higher in the coming months, quarters and years, Bernanke argued in his post that this “guidance” has had the opposite of the desired effect – it’s softened the economy.
A month later, in September, in Yellen’s post-FOMC press conference, she said this in response to why they didn’t raise rates: “the decision not to raise rates today and to wait for some further evidence that we’re continuing on this course is largely based on the judgment that we’re not seeing evidence that the economy is overheating.” Safe to argue, the economy isn’t overheating, still.
Again, as I said on Friday, the only difference between now and then, is the prospects of major fiscal stimulus, which is precisely what the Fed claims to be ignoring/leaving out of their forecasts – a believe it when I see it approach, allegedly.
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