Moneycontrol Pro Panorama | 25 or 50 bps? It’s a coin toss

Moneycontrol's Pro Panorama September 16 edition: China raises its retirement age, impact of higher duties on edible oil imports, assessing India’s gains from Quad membership, challenges for India on road to become a semiconductor hub, and more

Ravi Ananthanarayanan

September 16, 2024 / 15:57 IST

All eyes on US Fed’s decision on interest rates.

Dear Reader,

This week’s main event for markets is the US Fed’s decision on interest rates. Of course, it’s a foregone conclusion that rates will be cut, but to dismiss the importance of this event would be a mistake. For one, it caps a journey that began when COVID upended life globally in 2020. While protecting people’s health was the first priority, central bankers worked in their corner to protect the economy through monetary easing.

Since it happened in a coordinated manner the network effect magnified its impact, the economy stayed healthy, asset prices inflated as money gushed into all available opportunities. Finally, COVID ended. But high inflation did a dance around central bankers trying to tame it, with even the US Fed getting it wrong on the inflation-being-transitory front. Geopolitics upended supply chains, making the fight tougher. But interest rates were hiked higher and higher till inflation was finally brought to heel and the economy was slowed down or even on the verge of a recession according to some indicators. After a long process of monetary whack-a-mole that tired out impatient investors, there appears to be enough confidence that inflation has durably settled at acceptable levels for the US to start cutting rates. The ECB has already commenced it.

What are the signals for investors? My colleague Manas Chakravarty decodes them in this article, finding that the Fed Funds futures price in a rate cut as being certain, but are divided in the middle (probabilistically speaking) on whether the rate cut will be 25 or 50 basis points. Equity markets have moved modestly, but the bond markets have moved sharply. But the really interesting bit is this, that the Fed Funds futures are also factoring in a probability of more than 50 percent of a 200 bps cumulative cut in six months in the Fed Funds rate, to 3.25-3.5 percent. The FOMC, in contrast, has a median forecast of 4.1 percent at the end of 2025! That leaves enough of a spread for disappointment. Don’t miss Chakravarty’s piece, to know more about what could disappoint investors on September 18, how markets could react to the decision and most importantly, what the decision can mean for Indian investors (hint: the news ‘flow’ is good).

The FT’s Colby Smith lays out in this piece (free to read for MC Pro subscribers) the scenarios facing the Fed, its ability to bring policy quickly into the neutral zone, the importance of communication by the Fed, US elections and it’s a fine balancing act that is needed from the US Fed. A former Fed official and currently a Yale professor, William English, puts it succinctly, “If they do 25 [basis points], they will want to be clear that they’re not just hopelessly behind the curve and oblivious to what’s going on in the economy, and that they’ll move quickly if they need to,” he said. “If they do 50 [basis points], they’ll want to be clear that they’re not on a really fast march to neutral.”