Deep Dive

DEEP DIVE: Inflation: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

Apr 20, 2024 7 min read paid

Inflation I: The Good Obviously, the outlook for inflation matters greatly to determining Fed policymaking and the course of the economy. Let’s have a closer look at the latest inflation data to identify the good, the bad, and the ugly: (1) CPI excluding shelter. Debbie and I are encouraged to see that the headline and core CPI inflation rates excluding shelter were only 2.3% y/y (versus 3.

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: The Amazing Flying Machine

Apr 6, 2024 6 min read paid

GDP I: Still Flying. Not Landing. It’s official: There was no recession in 2022 or 2023. There was no hard landing in either year. There was a soft landing of sorts in 2022, but the economy was flying high last year and remains on that flight path in 2024. Consumers continued to increase their spending through the end of last year, upending forecasts (not ours) that the dwindling of

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: The Fed Put Is Back

Mar 30, 2024 6 min read paid

Monetary Policy I: Post-Modern Monetary Theory Melissa and I received quite a few favorable reader comments on last Monday’s Morning Briefing discussing our “Post-Modern Monetary Theory” (P-MMT). Many of the comments included thought-provoking queries about our P-MMT, which I address below. In addition, the Financial Times is running my summary of our theory in an op-ed titled “The Fed should resist messing with success.” The basic concept of P-MMT

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: The Fed In A Presidential Election Year

Mar 23, 2024 3 min read paid

Notwithstanding last week’s hotter-than-expected CPI and PPI reports, the financial markets are still anticipating that the Federal Reserve will cut the federal funds rate three times over the next 12 months. On Friday, the nearby federal funds rate futures was 5.33%, while the 12-month futures was 4.47% (Fig. 1 below). That 86-basis-point spread implies that investors expect at least three cuts of 25 basis points each by

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: 'Pent-Up Exuberance'

Mar 15, 2024 4 min read paid

Raphael Bostic is the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He is a 2024 voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee. In a March 4 post on his bank’s website, he warned about “pent-up exuberance.” He acknowledged that inflation has slowed, but he fears that it could accelerate quickly if the Fed stops tapping on the economy’s brakes and begins to step on

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: Global Economy Muddling Along To New Record-High Stock Prices

Mar 10, 2024 4 min read paid

The UK and Japan are in recessions. Germany is on the edge of falling into a recession. China’s property bubble has burst, which is depressing the overall economy and weighing on other Asian economies. The weakness in the global economy is evident in commodity prices. The S&P Goldman Sachs Commodity Price index is down 31% from its March 8, 2022 peak (Fig. 1 below). The CRB raw

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: The Roaring 1990s vs The Roaring 2020s

Mar 1, 2024 8 min read paid

Since the start of the 2020s, we’ve been comparing the current decade mostly to the 1920s and the 1970s. However, the S&P 500’s 42.3% meltup since October 12, 2022 to a new record high on February 23 has us considering whether another period represents a possible analogous scenario, i.e., the second half of the 1990s. We see parallels between conditions then and now that

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: Artificial Intelligence Isn't Intelligent

Feb 23, 2024 3 min read paid

I. Is AI Ready for Primetime? The Roaring 2020s started in the stock market on November 30, 2022. That’s when OpenAI launched ChatGPT. I signed up for the $20 per month version of this program that is driven by artificial intelligence (AI). It can write reports and carry on a conversation. I gave it a whirl to see if it might write our Morning Briefings or our shorter QuickTakes.

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: Why Were Economists So Wrong?

Feb 19, 2024 7 min read paid

Why were so many economists and strategists so wrong in their predictions of a recession over the past two years? Now seems to be a good time to answer this question since there are lots of lessons to be learned from the widely held misconceptions of the past two years. Let’s review them: (1/10) Tight monetary policies always cause recessions. The Fed raised the federal funds rate (FFR)

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: Productivity Is Making A Roaring Comeback

Feb 10, 2024 3 min read paid

Our Roaring 2020s economic scenario is predicated on our assumption that chronic labor shortages, especially of skilled workers, will cause businesses to boost the productivity of the available labor force. Technological advances will enable the boost, and it should be a dramatic one. Accordingly, we expect a productivity growth boom during the current decade. It may well be that the boom started at the end of 2015, was interrupted by

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: Party Like It's 1999!

Jan 26, 2024 3 min read

Is it possible that the meltup phase of the bull market (which started on October 12, 2022) has begun already—having started following the correction low on October 27, 2023? Yes, it is possible. Since that recent low, investors have become much less concerned about such adverse macro issues as a recession, higher interest rates, persistent inflation, and the federal government deficit. Instead, they are excited about the likelihood that

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: A Very Brief History of Recoveries & Expansions

Jan 20, 2024 2 min read paid

How much longer might the current economic expansion last? That remains a widely disputed question. The debate started between the hard-landers, soft-landers, and no-landers in early 2022, continued in 2023, and now continues in 2024. We remain in the soft-or-no-landing camp. We have a sense of “déjà vu all over again” about this debate. We were among the no-landers for several years following the 2007-08 recession. We even compiled a

Ed Yardeni

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