The list of reasons why the financial market’s wild swings can keep going and even worsen is growing by the day — starting with the fact that investors aren’t yet pricing in worst-case scenarios for inflation and the U.S. economy.
Though Wednesday’s consumer-price index report for April should offer more clues, the data won’t entirely settle the question of where inflation is likely go from here. What’s more, stock-market investors have yet to price in a recession, with DataTrek co-founder Nick Colas saying that the S&P 500 would have to fall to 3,525 from its current level just above 4,000 in order to reflect 50:50 odds of a U.S. downturn.
Inflation may have more room to run Economists and traders alike are relying a great deal on the word “peaked” right now. That’s because the prevailing view among professional forecasters is that inflation has already gotten, or is close to getting, to as high as it can go. The annual headline rate of inflation reached a 40-year high of 8.5% in March, and is seen coming in a bit below that in Wednesday’s release.
During the first half of the 1970s, while the U.S. was still involved in the Vietnam War, the headline annual rate of the consumer price index shot above 10% for more than a year under then-Fed Chairman Arthur Burns. Though Burns took the fed-funds rate above 10% for part of this time, according to FactSet data, that didn’t obviate the need for his predecessor, Paul Volcker, to send rates back further into double digits at the end of the decade when inflation rose back above 10%.
Then, in a podcast released Friday, Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin told Market News International that he wouldn’t rule out a 75 basis point move. His colleague, Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester, supported that view to some extent on Tuesday, when she said the Fed isn’t ruling out 75 basis point moves forever but that the current pace of 50 basis point hikes seemed “about right” to her at present.
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