St. Louis Fed President James Bullard spoke with the WSJ in an interview that was published early in NY trading.
He echoed a view that we’ve heard from other Fed members, saying that global factors are pulling down Treasury yields, not domestic inflation worries. That’s odd because in October he hit the panic button on breakeven rates when 5 years were at 1.45% and they’re at 1.20% now.
WSJ: Does [the bond rally] tell you anything about the U.S. economy and in particular the outlook for U.S. inflation?
Mr. BULLARD: No I don’t really think so because I think it is being driven by the specter of ECB quantitative easing. I don’t think it is really a signal of U.S. economic strength.
In the history of the Fed, policymakers have thought they were smarter than the bond market many times and they were almost always wrong.
Bullard did add a caveat, saying he wants to see what happens to breakevens once oil flattens out.
MR. BULLARD: I do worry about TIPS-based inflation compensation and it has been down a lot recently and it does concern me. What I want to do with that is wait and see what happens in global oil markets, wait and see what equilibrium turns out to be and then see what happens with breakeven inflation at that point. I want to let the dust settle on the oil market and then go back and check breakeven inflation rates and see what’s happened.
Overall, Bullard sounds like he’s in a rush to get rates away from the “emergency” lows. Sounds like in the rush to pretend that everything is normal, the Fed is taking its eye off the ball.
