Osaka Corp, Fed Chair, Janet Yellen told investors what they wanted to hear during her testimony to the Senate Banking Committee. She told committee members that the inclement weather that has lashed the United States since December last year may have had an impact upon recent economic data.
“It’s clear that investors want to hear that the US economy is still performing well enough for the Fed to continue its taper of stimulus because it means the bull run in equities has a better chance of continuing,” said an Osaka Corp researcher.
The firm says it believes that there are fundamental weaknesses in the recovery which the bad weather is being used to explain away but it suggests that the next jobs report could mark the point at which investors face up to the inalienable truth; namely that the recovery has stalled yet again.
“Many believe that the taper is financial and political theater with the Fed more or less playing a pre-determined part win which it pretends to be hawkish and looking for a way out of QE knowing all the while that it has little choice but to keep printing money in order to keep America’s borrowing costs down,” said the Osaka Corp researcher.
Ms. Yellen is slowly but surely establishing herself as a more dovish Chair than her predecessor, Ben Bernanke who saw out his tour of duty at the world’s most powerful central bank by ordering two rounds of stimulus reduction from $85bn per month to $65bn.
The Osaka Corp researcher said, “We don’t know if the Fed will stall on worsening data but we do know that it’s more likely to with Yellen at the helm.”