No, you're our stop. Sorry. Little campfire. Yeah, alright. Good. Good. Good go. Go. Alright, everybody. Welcome back to another round of Edition of Ford Guidance. And we are recording live from Washington, D.C. We're out here at the monetary and Two conference put on by reserve. Super excited to be here. It's myself, Quint Thompson. And we pulled in Joseph Wang, Fed Guy, to join us this week. So super excited to have you guys here, chat in here in Washington, D.C. What's going on guys? How much excited to be here. Good weather. A lot of. Absolutely. Great to meet you again. Quint and Felix. It's great to be here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Quick show of hands. Who's listening to the Ford Guidance podcast before? Nice. Good for today. Awesome. Cool to see that. For everyone listening, there's thousands of hands raised. Yeah, thousands and thousands. You just hear the roars and claps. That was the most beautiful, the biggest crowd. Yes, huge.
不,不好意思,你就是我们的目的地。小型篝火会。好的,好的,很好。大家好,欢迎回到另一轮的《Ford Guidance》。我们正在华盛顿特区现场录制。这次我们参加的是由储备银行主办的"货币与二"会议,非常激动能来到这里。我是Quint Thompson,我们这周还邀请了"Fed Guy" Joseph Wang加入我们。非常高兴你们也在这里,一起在华盛顿特区聊天。大家怎么样?非常兴奋能来这里,天气不错。真高兴再次见到你们,Quint和Felix。真不错。大家举手表示一下,谁听过《Ford Guidance》播客?太好了,今天真不错。看到这么多人真棒。大家听着,好几千只手都举起来了。是的,数以千计。你能听到欢呼和掌声。那是最多人、最大的观众,真是太棒了。
Okay, so I want to start by talking about the FOMC meeting that just happened yesterday and get the high level takeaways there. Someone interesting one, but also not interesting at the same time. But just going to go through a few data points here. I'm going to pull up my phone just because it was a dot plot, summary of economic projections, updated meetings. So there's a lot of data to get into and start to understand. So just looking at the dots here, in terms of their GDP projection, they actually down ticked their projection for the March meeting for 2025 from 1.7 to 1.4%. So expecting lower growth for the unemployment rate for the March projection was 4.4, looking at 4.5% by the end of the year. And PCE inflation in increase again from 2.7 to 3, which comes off the back of another previous increase from the previous March meeting for the December one further.
So this is an interesting situation. We're seeing growth being down ticked in their forecast. We're seeing inflation taking up higher. But at the same time, we actually didn't see any changes on their projections for Fed funds rate cutting. So most of the policy members basically as you added them all together when you look at the dot plots, we saw that the majority still ticked in for two cuts coming this year. What was interesting, however, is that yes, 10 of them had a two cuts by the end of the year. But there was an increase of FOMC members from 4 to 7 that were projecting no cuts by the end of this year. So lots to get into. Obviously, I'd even mentioned the fact that they didn't cut rates, which shouldn't have been a surprise to anybody. But that's not what we've marked. So what really moves it is obviously these dot plots and the press conference that came forth.
So what a pass it to you, Joseph, and just based on all that data, what was your read, what was your takeaways? Well, first off, I think, like you mentioned Felix, and that was a really good summary. What was most interesting to me was the dot plot forecast. It seems like the Fed is a bit more downbeat on the revising down growth, but also it seemed a little bit stagnationary, right? You're revising up inflation and you're rising unemployment. All in all, that seems like not good. Now, the Fed has always been saying for the past few months that they are basically just going to be late. So they're not cutting this time, and they kept their forecast from the last time. So what Paul has been telling us is that there's so many things happening in the economy. We have changes in policy from changes in immigration policy, fiscal policy. Of course, we have changes in regulatory policy and policy as well. And he doesn't know what's going to happen, and so he's just going to wait to see what the data says.
That's a little bit different than how he usually acts, where he tries to get ahead of it. Now, remember, he cut 50 basis points right before the election last year, thinking that there was a recession wanting to get ahead of it. But now he's committing to being late. So what that tells me is that he's really not going to do anything until we see the unemployment rate tick up. And it's been trending higher. Right now, the unemployment rate is 4.2%. But maybe, and Quinn will probably talk about this. But we see a lot of indicators in labor market that it's softening. Paul has a different take. He seems to be very happy with 4.2% describing as full employment. But it seems like until that ticks higher, we're not going to get rate cuts.
Yeah, I thought it was interesting when you compared March to June on the dots. Basically, the only incremental change for 2025 was that three people went from one cut to no cut. And one person went from two cuts to one cut. So it was, you know, that's hawkish. And I think one came out of, one cut came out of 26, I believe, or 27, in the backdrop of that revised, worse economic data. And he seemed like, for one, the nearest cut is not priced until September anyways. So, you know, being three months out, does how much does this meeting really have near-term impact on markets? Not a ton.
I did think it was interesting because I think we discussed this on last week's how in that recent labor market, labor report, that the unemployment rate barely stuck at 4.2%. So it was like 0.005%, very easily could have been 4.3%. But also that it stayed steady for the wrong reasons, meaning declining total number of employed and lower labor force number. And so someone did ask about the immigration issues, and he noted that this dynamic where you can have a stable, more stable unemployment rate for the reasons of not growing labor, but actually shrinking labor force.
And he basically acknowledged this as being okay. You know, it will hold the unemployment rate lower for longer, and they will not look through that to infer a weaker labor market. So on many accounts, very hawkish, it's very clear they expect at least some meaningful upticket inflation. And, you know, even September is, I don't know, how guaranteed that is at this point off there. I think you really need to see market weakness for them to move.
Yeah, my take is just that it feels like, you know, it's clear that Chair Powell is trying to get to the finish line of his term in one piece. Like, I think he would have preferred if he could have just skipped the whole press conference in general and just been like, all right, we're not doing anything, we're just going to sit there and don't talk to me until at least 2026. But he's not in a situation where he can do that, so it has to go up there. And the issue is that, like, monetary policy cannot not do anything. By doing nothing, it's still an intentional policy choice.
So just by them sitting flat as they are right now and that they hope to do so for quite a bit of time to continue, that's still an intentional policy decision because the economy is dynamic and it's moving all the time. And as they sit, if you just think about like a classic Taylor Rule type model, we see them stay flat at the same time that the unemployment rate takes higher. And to your point, we were very close to 4.3%. So you have that situation and then you have these continuous downsides of prizes in the inflation print. You know, like, we can keep holding out and wait for the tariff inflation to show up in the CPI data.
And yes, maybe the big ones coming next print. But the fact of the matter is, is that, you know, of course, CPI, month over a month came out of 10 basis points. And that's a huge mess. So there's a lot of services disinflation. There's, we can talk about this some more, but there's a lot of fracturing underneath the surface of that unemployment rate in terms of the labor market. So it just feels, and I'm curious both of your thoughts on this, that by just staying flat, it's still restricting, creating even more restrictive monetary policy stance, even though their intention is just to not do anything that goes either hawkish or dovish, but by doing nothing, they're actually being hawkish.
Yeah, as inflation comes down, gruel rates go higher, right? So I think one of the points that he mentioned was that if you were back we're looking at the data, you'd probably be cutting by now. Like you mentioned, the market is softening. We have four, we could have been 4.3%. If you look at continuing employment claims, that continues to rise, right? That means the stock of the unemployed people are rising. So if you lose your job, it's harder, harder to find a new one. Now this past week, there was also a very interesting story in the Wall Street Journal showing how new grads are having a lot of trouble finding a new job.
So the unemployment rate for young people is also rising. So definitely clear weakening in the labor market. Now inflation has been on the coming in softer as well. Not just CPI, like you mentioned Phoenix, but the Fed's goal, headline PCE came in at 2.1% year every year in April, 2.1%, 2%, that's pretty close to me, right? So the Fed is not acting in response to this data because it's telling us, like you mentioned, that we have inflation from tariffs coming down the pipeline.
So in the press conference, what really struck me was that, you know, Chair Powell was like, you know, the professional forecasters, basically the experts are telling me that inflation is coming down the pipeline from tariffs and so forth. And that's so super reasonable, but it's also not consistent with how he's behaved the past few years, right? The past few years, let's listen to the forecasters that got us nowhere. And so it's like, oh, hey, let's listen to the data, let's be data dependent. Okay, let's do that. Now that the data is like, we should cut, let's listen to the forecasters now, right? So he just wants to be hawkish. That's he's finding reasons to be hawkish. So yeah. It's pretty funny. I don't know which press member asked Powell about this, but they brought up that point that, you know, okay, well you were saying that your data dependent, the data right now is saying that you should probably be cutting.
Yeah, you got caught up in his words. He's just like, well, you know, now I was saying, well, we're looking into the future and there's inflation coming, but to your point, like that's going against everything. So I mean, yeah, it's just the Fed wants to be hawkish and, you know, we can complain and piece apart, but that's just what they want to do. They just want to get to the finish line of 2026 and the final reason to do that. And, you know, we can talk a bit about the macroeconomic impact of that, but yeah, just seems to be the way it is. I think the case to cut is also not that.
Like one of Powell's points was he said something along lines, which he almost never comments on the market, but this so he kind of was, it was one of more interesting pressers I've found in recent few, but he mentioned something along lines of the current market conditions and how things are trading or something of that nature do not reflect very restrictive or extremely restrictive or some language. Which he's kind of got a point. I mean, if stock are back at all time highs, valuations where they're at, like, and I think there is some anchoring bias for all market participants where it's like, you know, in the grand scheme of things for two, if you look back many years and history is pretty low. It's just the underlying nuances is, you know, in the weakening of, you know, the lower middle income class. So it's a tough situation.
I can't say he's like that wrong to not move. Yeah, that's fair. I think too, like, an interesting situation where I know just how noisy all this economic data is right now. Either it's, you know, we had retail sales last week and the seasonal adjustments were just pretty significant. And we had like, you know, the control group surprised the upside and then everything else surprised at the downside. We have, you know, the NFP has been revised every month quite significantly. So yeah, it's a tough situation like Joseph and Kyrus on your thoughts. Just what do you think are the best reads on the actual state of the economy right now? Because it just feels like every data point has so much noise to it.
I think that's that's really hard because a lot of people are behaving differently in response to the macro shots we're having, right? So we had widely telegraph tariffs. Everyone was kind of importing a lot beforehand. Maybe consumers also stocking up beforehand. So then we had the big tariffs. Everyone was scared. Trump pivoted. Now we have some 90 day pause. So maybe people are restarting or maybe they stopped too much and now they they run down their inventory. So I think the data is going to be really noisy and I don't really know how to read it the past few months. Yeah, totally.
Okay, so something else is happening. I think it's next week is that we got news that the Fed is planning to have a meeting about the supplemental leverage ratio, which when you talked about earlier in your panel today here at the conference, but that's been an interesting one because it feels like this carrot that's been dangling over the market for like the past six months where there's talk, you know, every time it feels like on the treasury side as well, Scott Besson is talking about we want to deregulate the banks. We want to alleviate capital ratios and risk based capital ratios as well.
So the Fed have announced that they're planning to have a meeting next week where they're looking at actually implementing some sort of either SLR exemption for trust. So we've got a lot of SLR exemption for treasuries or just a meaningful loosening of those SLR levels. So fortunately we got Joseph here who's been at the Nürk Fed work in that world very deeply. So I'd just be curious if you could just explain to us the whole dynamic. Why are they pursuing this deregulation approach and how does it mechanically work into the market with their talk about?
Sure. So just taking a step back in 2008 we had a huge crisis in the financial sector and that hurt a lot of people and so the regulators decided we can't let this happen again. So we got to regulate banks in a big way. And so they passed all these regulations, Dodd-Frank and also internationally there's a Basel III. And what these regulations do is at the end of the day impose a whole bunch of costs on banks based on the size and composition of their balance sheet.
So for example, you have risk weighted assets where let's say that if you hold a riskier corporate loan you have to hold more capital against that capital for a bank is a liability. So it's like a cost. So that makes sense right if you hold and it's used to intended to absorb losses. So that makes sense if you have are making really risky loan you should have lots of capital against that in case that loan goes sour the capital can absorb the losses rather than the depositors that makes sense.
And also let's say that we don't want banks to ever have like a liquidity run right so that's kind of what happened in 2008. So we're going to mandate them to hold all sorts of liquid assets, tons of reserves and also make sure that their liability structure is more sound so make sure they're not barring too much overnight make sure they have let's say longer dated liabilities that can be run on. So there are depositors can run as easily also we do stuff like stress tests and so forth and to cap it all off just to make sure that we just in case we got anything wrong because as we know from the financial crisis in 2008 sometimes things that are triple A are not actually triple A.
So they added something that was a backstop and this is a which is basically leverage ratio where banks have to hold capital against an asset regardless of its riskiness so it's basically completely based on size so for example in this case in the leverage ratio you'd have to hold the same amount of capital against treasors as you would risk risky corporate loan. So this S.O.L.R. right now on the bank holding company holding level it's about 5% on the bank level it's about 6% for the largest banks and this has been a real hindrance for banks that traffic and assets that are very safe like treasuries because it imposes costs on these trading these assets that are that don't really make sense because they're liquid and credit risk free.
And it's been widely thought of that raising the costs of banks traffic getting these risky riskless assets has been harming the markets and so we saw that in 2020 when we had a crash in the treasury market and regulators in response suspended the implements suspended S.O.L.R. for a year and that seemed to help a little bit. And now as you know the treasury market continues to grow because we continue to issue a lot of debt it's becoming more of a highlight for the regulators they don't want the market to break and they're also thinking that maybe if we were to decrease the cost of banks and holding these treasuries maybe they would buy more maybe that will put downward pressure on interest rates.
So that seems to be the impetus for trying to change these regulatory things and they've been talking about it a lot and now they're finally having some action which is which rules announced and it could be through just toggling the ratio it could be exempting reserves or something like that but that's something they'll try to figure out. So maybe that will have some relief for the market.
Yeah it feels like there's still a bit of debate now on the impact of what this will do and there's a lot of different interesting cross currents when you just look at the composition of all the different decisions or policies that are being made right now. So okay we have a treasury that is issuing a lot more bills than historical standards they are avoiding at all costs increasing the proportion of coupon issuance that they're providing to the market.
That's been something that people started to call it like activist treasury issuance or the economics but it's clear that Scott Bessens is continuing that. Now we have forward guidance in the quarterly funding announcements basically where they mention that there's no plans to increase the amount of coupon issuance so it's all going to go towards the bill side of issuance. So you have that dynamic happening right now. You have what's going on in terms of the debt ceiling situation where they cannot issue more debt so we go into the situation of extraordinary measures where they do a lot of different tweaks to be able to continue to issue debt and then once that's complete they start to run down the treasury general account.
And that X date gets to around us early August right now where if they do not come to some sort of resolution on increasing the debt ceiling we would theoretically default obviously there's further protections against that but that's a theory so you have that situation and so what happens is that the treasury general account gets drawn down and then as soon as the debt ceiling gets resolved they got to rebuild it back up to basically a level where I forget the exact number of but effectively they want to be able to keep about a week's worth of treasure. So that gets us to about $800 billion right now so I think you had the numbers of where we at in terms of right now the TGA versus the art because this is the dynamic right is that you have you have a lot of bill issuance that needs to be rebuilt and we need to think about where does those flows come from and that really I'll circle this back onto the S.L.R. thing but do you want to just explain a little bit on terms of where enters the TGA dynamics and where that got funded last time because you have some interesting analysis around that.
Yeah so this recent tax payment date and actually hitting in the June quarterly of this week refilled the TGA from like 250 to 220 it got down to the back up to around 450 I think for 70 and then I think there's about 150 or so in the RRP so that'll all get drained you know the X date in August is when the TGA basically is zero and you know depending on if it's early July or late July in whatever that is we'll dictate how much of a refills needed but it's from here it's you know however much they refill it's going to get drawn down in the meantime but the interesting thing is that in 2023 the most recent analog where this occurred reaching the debt ceiling and refilling TGA they had massive amount in the RRP to buffer the TGA.
So I believe when they refilled the TGA from June 23 to October 23 is about the time it took so like five months or four or five months they also drained the reverse repo program by about a trillion dollars in that time period to bolster the market. And in this go around they have about 150 there and there's also about 2x the nominal coupon issuance number that needs to be hit so I think best sent is well aware of this and you know the last two times of these TGA refills long duration bond yields rose over 150 base points and so they're trying to pull out all the stops including SLR to bolster that but the tough thing about because I think most of the analysis I've seen around the SLR from the banks and stuff is evaluated in the context of what occurred during COVID when the last time they made this exemption and that's a difficult comparison because at the time no one there was one it was we're potentially in deflation for that short amount of time and the Fed had four guidance stating there's no cuts in the foreseeable future and inflation was trans to et cetera.
So we saw the repercussions of that mentality and the same thing. Result in the 2023 banking crisis where everyone was stuffed to the guilds with duration treasure yields blew out and all these balance sheets were insolvent and needed to be essentially you know bailed out or massage in a way by the Fed so I think there's probably PTSD on the banking side that restricts them in addition to a less rosy view on yields that limits how effective that's a lot is I think it'll do something but yeah I feel like when you put that all together that's why I know there's a lot of debate around okay well why are we doing this SLR exemption thing because it's not like these banks are actually heading like they're not actually constrained by a SLR right now they're more so I believe correct me from wrong Joseph but they're more so constrained by like the risk weighted like ratios as opposed to the supplementary leverage ratio but the way I think about it is it feels like more so they're trying to you know I remember when we introduced the RIP facility like ramped it up and started increasing the runway they talked about greasing greasing the runway and it feels like they're not going to be able to do that.
So I'm trying to grease and the runway right now for when this huge rebuild comes forth so you see this dynamic of trying to get these deregulations to happen and then furthermore we're starting to see them try to really pass this genius act bill. That's an interesting one because the fastest growing buyers of treasury debt right now are stable coins like tether they're the ninth largest holding and one of the fastest increasing right now so it feels to me like they're trying to prepare a lot of these to grease it for when we get to this August date to basically effectively rebuild the tether that's what it feels like and you know maybe we can we can talk a little about how we think that impacts the liquidity outlook and generally macro overall because to your point you think that yes these are factors that they can they can start to execute on but regardless it looks like long bond yields would likely increase.
I'm curious how you both think about what that would look like is obviously we've hit that 5% level a couple times on the long bond in the last couple months and the first time we hit it in the last couple months is around liberation day and not all impact and that's where we started to see a lot of seizing up in the treasury market a little bit. We've hit it a couple times since and it hasn't been as sketchy but it really feels like the 30 or especially getting above that 5% level is a level that nobody's really interested in happening. So I'm curious how you both think about the possibility of us going above that 5% level.
So like you mentioned the 30 year has been touching 5% for some time it really doesn't seem like it wants to go lower. I'd also take a step back and note that this is a global issue right the Japanese 40 year was in the news for some time it just keeps going higher and higher but similarly when we think about the Japanese 40 year it's gone down a lot because what they did was they they did a yellowonomics right so they changed the composition of issuance by issuing fewer elongated stuff and more more shorted it stuff and so when we think about elongated yields we have to remember that there's a whole lot of tricks in the back to keep it lower. One of them is just to pull a yellowonomics active as treasury issuance as Stephen Brown would say so that's possible but I think the trend absinal this would be to have higher yields but you know these are things that are carefully managed they can continue to issue more bills or they could say because of S.H.L.R. just go and force the banks to buy a lot more treasuries.
And now this is not something that they're talking about at all but if you take a step back through history whenever a government has too much debt this is not the first time this has ever happened before this happens all the time. Old governments actually run into these problems and one of the most common solutions is to have your commercial banks foot the bill and so maybe not today but maybe next year a couple years forward maybe that plays a bigger role and that puts somewhat of a soft ceiling on yields but until that happens actually in order to precipitate that we probably have to have the long bond continuing to go higher.
Yeah I'm of the belief that we do break out of the 5% I think it's like a big three year you know sending triangle wedge type thing and I think we might have skirted that move because of the delays in the bill because really the catalyst is when the refill starts but to me if you're a bank Jamie diamonds talked about this a lot of other bank CEOs have talked about this dynamic in the treasury market and and Fulmy wants shame on you Fulmy. I think we're actually headed for a meaningful breakout and in the 30 year and in my opinion would be could be upwards of 100 basis points to like over 6% later this year and you just you know you get the momentum guys you get everybody on that trade once it starts going and in this debt burden problem that has to come post bill passing so for me the real catalyst is when when the bill comes and you know we'll see what we're going to do.
I don't think it's good for risk and it particularly don't think that it will be good when people recognize this dynamic of risk down yields up and and how you're kind of stuck in that case because Fed cuts ultimately make things worse. An interesting thing I'm going to throw into the mix here to think about you is the situation that we're going to have to start to think a lot more about which is what happens in 2026 and who replaces chair Powell because that is going to very much start to be considered into the market especially you know something like the two year yield is going to have to start to discount that.
So we need to start thinking about what will look like when we get into this regime where if we see a long bond set up and we're going to see what we're going to do. We're going to sell off at the same time that we start to get guidance on who's going to replace Powell and it's probably going to be a dove a very very dovish the dubious dove you've ever seen. You know we could and you started to see this in the sulfur curve start to price it to and start to consider it is what happens in 2026 when we get a super dovish chair that cuts rates by 200 bips regardless of where we are in the economy.
And how does that get digested because there's a lot of different cross currents there. If you start to wait all your bill issue if you start to wait all your issuance towards bills those are very sensitive to the fed funds rate as opposed to the long end so you can cut your interest expense by a ton but by doing so you're probably going to also lose the long end.
And so I'm curious on both of your thoughts on how do you start to think about this fact of what could happen if you know this uses the radical of 200 bips cut in the fed funds regardless of where we are in the economy. How does the market digest that situation and deal with it. You know the president gave an interview last week and he was like you know chirp how he's like a stupid person you know maybe I'll just appoint myself so hey we'll just skip the middleman we'll just have president from the chair after all as you mentioned before it's like the easiest job ever you show up in the office once a month flip a coin and then everyone thinks you're a god so it's such an easy thing to do.
He's a race guy he says. So you're right I think that whoever president should have a point it's going to be someone who's pretty dumbish now to be clear some of the people he's been floating like Kevin wash and as I understand he wanted to to hike rates after the Lehman brothers went down so he's not historically known to be a dove but you know we can involve in our thinking.
Other people I think whoever he chooses is probably going to have to profess some sort of a double-bushed inclination so yeah we definitely are going to get a double-bushed chair if you were to really cut rates a lot I think what I would be working at is the dollar because I think that could severely depreciate the dollar that would be really bad for all dollar assets. When it comes to longer data bonds yes definitely agree with longer data yields going higher it's going to be really bad for the bond market but again like I mentioned before there are so many tools for the government to manage this at the end of the day this is just a giant database these are just numbers in a computer and the government controls that computer so they can make it so that the their buyers be at the Fed at the very last you know chair Trump will just go and buy long and or something like that I'm not saying this will happen but these are things that they can do to make sure that they're going to be a good job.
They can do to make sure the long end doesn't get out of control what they have less control of is the currency and so that's what I would place my biggest bet on. Yeah I tend to agree I mean you wonder how much of the psychological benefit of that easing would be priced in ahead of time as well right like I think as Joseph mentioned you would see the moves in the dollar and probably some of these like gold or safe-hook assets. And as well as the bond market really because if you're if you're a 10 20 30 year long-grain bond investor you know the next year kind of doesn't matter too much relative to what's out there so that would be a dramatic steeper and in many ways maybe even go against his actual like the market effects actually might go against his intentions in that sense and what I also would point out just as well as the market is going to be a good job.
What I also would point out just on the interest expenses the average way to average maturity of our interest expense of US debt right now I think is like three and a half it's it's under four so even if the guy comes in and cuts 100 from here it actually doesn't really lower interest expense all that much. Yeah so I don't know I'm not buying too much or incorporating that the sort of hysteria around this the shadow fed too much yet because I think there's a lot of unknowns but I do think as we get into like Q4 it starts to become relevant when you're sub six months out.
Putting everything together like you mentioned so we have that stable coin stuff Steve genius act stable coins buying more bills maybe their issue more bills maybe we'll have a fed that cuts rates that yeah that together you end up with short rates lower in the government borrowing more in the short or dated sector so that that would be helpful for interest expense I don't know if that that's what they're actually do but that's that's a potential contours for a plan. Yeah definitely stimulative inflation progress pro inflation pro nominal growth.
Another theme to all of this is the theme of fiscal dominance which is a word that gets thrown out I think a little too easily versus what could really happen but it's been interesting to see what's going on on the fiscal side right now where we've started to see it's been led by Senator Ted Cruz about removing interest on reserve balances which is something that they implemented in no eight and you know effectively the banks can park a bunch of their reserves at the fed and they're in a pretty good yield and that yield is basically we we are subsidizing effectively bank revenues and profits from printing money that's effectively what happened so that's the discussion at hand right now but it's a really interesting situation because we implement monetary policy very differently from from back in 2008 where the interest on reserve balances is a very important factor for protecting that range of the fed funds range so that's the same.
So I would love for you to just explain like obviously this is just a theoretical right now there's just talk at the hill right now but like what would be the impact of something like that if we actually removed interest on reserve balances and what would happen. So like you mentioned we started paying interest on reserve balances after the great financial crises before that reserves had no interest so we started paying because at that time the Fed was doing kiwi flooding the system with reserves and banks were stuck with the interest of the fed and they were also in bad shape so if we gave them a little bit of interest that would support their income and they wouldn't have to be basically taxed by this and the Fed also uses the control interest rates.
Now there's a lot of ways to do this if we just you know win cold turkey and turn off IOR I think it would be tremendously disruptive now think about it you're like a bank JP Morgan you have a few hundred billion dollars worth of deposits at the fed that's suddenly yield nothing what are you going to do. First thing you're going to put a lot in the reverse reable facility you're going to max that out and then you're going to go out to say by bells lend and repel and so forth and that's going to put downward pressure on all short term interest rates and the federal funds market would disappear because there's no point in for that. So it's it'll be chaotic so I it's not going to be how it's done they're going to have to design it in a certain way so right now banks hold about three trillion dollars in reserves.
So I can't interest rates they're getting let's say a hundred and twenty billion dollars worth of interesting come from the government they don't we the government really doesn't need to be paying all that to them so there's definitely some scope to try to make it so that. Well maybe it's less so I think this is something that Ted Cruz has a point on and you don't actually need Congress to do this you just kind of need the Fed to do this or a new Fed chair. So this is something the Fed has a right to do it doesn't they don't need Congress to do that with.
Yeah I bring that up around this framing of fiscal dominance because that's sort that's these are ideas that are starting to feel like that because that's effectively it feels like the fiscal side of things is is obviously they're always creating the guard rails around monetary policy through congressional approval but it feels like this is getting a lot more heavy handed where it's like hey you know this is what we're doing we're trying to we're trying to narrow the fiscal deficit and. I'm just curious how you both think about that situation of if we see this trend continue of these decisions being made and then the Fed having to to react in these different ways in terms of how they actually implement monetary policy it feels like that's a very different theme from the last 15 years.
I think fiscal dominance is been with us for the last really since I mean dating back to covid but also the examples in 2022 and in 2023 the March banking crisis the real yield scare in October of 2013. In these cases where they've had to do things to really the reason they've had to step into the markets in these cases is because of the pressure on the long term bond market the worst case thus far was a recent cases. Ben the bank of England guilt crisis in October 23 but October 22 but you've also had the Japanese bond market problems and and you're broadly so. It's kind of where everybody's headed and it's really like playing the game of fiat pairs is almost like who's going to get in a worse situation quicker and the cadencing.
The reason the US dollar is so at risk and all this is because of the extreme it's not that. Japan's fiscal situation is great or Europe's or France is in a anywhere decent of a spot it's simply because of the concentration of US asset holdings by foreigners and what I you know saying earlier is this blow off top in US dominance and exceptionalism earlier this year that culminated in. The largest concentrations and asset flows into US dollar US dollar assets and in decades so that's the risk really here for the dollars is that that rewinds as a result of whatever types of confidence crises that that may arise but you know immigration and tariffs are definitely helping accelerate it.
Yeah okay I want to zoom out a little bit and start to incorporate some of the global impacts of both capital flows and obviously the geopolitical situation happening in the Middle East right now and really just focus on some of the market impacts because I don't pretend to have any sort of meaningful edge in predicting these geopolitical outcomes right now but what we do know is that what's developing in the Middle East is increasing Taylorist for oil which would increase Taylorist for inflation which would increase Taylorist for long blast. So you have that situation and then also this situation around global capital flows until your point about the blow off top in American exceptionalism that we feel sort of happened in January a lot of that is also tied to tariffs and balance of payments resolution whether that be through tariffs or through basically capital controls on the other side you know there's some interesting tidbits in the big beautiful bill right now that are effectively.
Either taxing remittances or you know for withholding taxes on US assets those are those are capital controls that are looking to decrease the flow of funds into US assets so based on those two dynamics I'm just curious where you guys are at in this thesis of American exceptionalism because you know just to think about the market in the last couple of months coming out of liberation day it felt like you know Europe is out performing on their equities a lot of different you know we saw these huge numbers. So much of this has been currency related but the last couple weeks we've seen the US market up for form a little bit and so I'm just curious how you both are thinking about these these dynamics of increasing oil price from Taylorist in the Middle East these balance of payment flows and how that all comes together into thinking about how much do I wait US domestic assets versus rest of the world.
Just just looking past the past few months what we've seen is that you know before what happened in the Middle East there was some some loss of the shiningness of US exceptionalism we saw that after liberation day dollar sold off, charger sold off US equity sold off and then you have tremendous outperformance in say European markets and the theme then was that you know the US we are kind of overexposed so couldn't have a great presentation this morning talking about how foreigners are just super super exposed to dollar out. So I think that's a lot of the vastness and it seems like I was reversing a bit where foreigners were moving back home a little bit. Now since the since what's happened in the Middle East I think well first off that's going to affect regions differently right for example in Europe they're much more dependent upon imported energy than the US who was actually the largest energy producer in the world.
What's been happening since then is that US assets seem to be doing a bit better than European assets and the dollar seems to be getting tiny tiny bit in strength but my read is that the dollar safe haven bit is not really strong I would have thought that would be stronger given this prospect of significant escalation in the Middle East. So I think this move away from US exceptionalism or as some would say the EM of occasion of the US is a structural theme it's not going to happen one day it's going to be two steps forward once that back so that glimpse of it we saw in the British and I think we'll see it again and I think it will see it more often but it's not just going to happen overnight we have entire framework that's been built up over decades and it's just not going to disappear so suddenly.
Yeah I think it's always you know there's always a shot across the bone move and then proceeding a bigger bigger thing because the majority of people's rec you know operating in the past regime and environment and you know nine eight times out of ten they're rewarded for that buying the dip or what have you and you know regime shifts don't come along too often but in this case I agree with Joseph that the sort of decline of the dollar is there's many forces influencing that and I think my view in the in the more immediate term is that there's record short positioning in the dollar everybody every bank research report I get is their highest conviction trade for the next six months a short dollar and in the futures market it's the same and then you kind of mix in some of these geopolitical things where you're going to be able to do that.
So I think that's where you know if oil price does remain elevated even though I don't think that's so much the case because Trump's so focused on it he literally dedicated his first international visit to the price of oil. So I'm not factoring that too much into into my projection but I do see sort of a rinse of that positioning you know when everybody thinks this outcomes going to happen it doesn't always happen linearly and ultimately though when if there is a larger risk of climate and if there is a larger decline in the US assets as a result of this and we just sat here and talked about how foreigners are loaded up to the gills on exposure they're taking nominal wealth hits as well just alongside everybody else and so yes there's a dynamic of repatriation and reallocation away from the US but if you're doing that from a minus ten or minus 20% basis in on top of if the currency gets hit in stocks are down ten or 15 and currencies down five that just adds to it so it's not like they're flourishing and have all this money to bring back home in a good way so I think you could maybe just see a situation where those assets fall less because there's less concentration less holdings and maybe on the other side of it they outperformed because people see this trend that's coming and the valuation differences still there but could be the next leg is just we haven't had the degrosing yet we haven't had the de leveraging yet the musical chairs are still being swapped around and if we do get a broader degrosing event then probably nothing even maybe gold is not safe in some of those cases.
It's always so tempting when we get into this type of conversation of talking about the assets of the reserve currency which is the US dollar in present day and it becomes very tempting to start to think about these are a lot of signs that lead to the end of the world. We need to the end of reserve currency status is often like you know this morning we had a really great presentation from Mark dinner who worked at bridge water and he's one of the heads of reddallas investment research team and he walked us through. You know looking at different regimes of previous reserve currencies and how how they fail in the process for them and it's it's really compelling stuff so I'm just I myself I find it very difficult to try to stay level headed. But then also see a lot of these signs and it's like you know we're taking all the boxes right now heading towards this direction of reserve currency change but at the same time that's been a losing trade for many many years now and there's been people talking about unsustainable fiscal deficits for my entire life and we've gone through many phases of that.
So I'm just you know curious on a high level how you how you both appropriately discount those two possibilities because it feels irresponsible to not. Even to not consider change reserve currencies because the history shows that they do change in the way that we're seeing right now but at the same time that's you know it's like what's the trade on that you know so I'm just curious like how do you both balance those possibilities. I think that so people have been talking about dollar losing reserve status for some time doesn't seem to be happening but some assets have been benefiting from that gradually over time gold for example right gold just keeps going higher and higher so dollars to reserve currency but gold is still benefiting so I think that will probably continue.
I think that we are at a point where I won't say reserve currency status being lost but being weakened and dollar being depreciated and that seems so obvious to me because there's so many things factors going for like you mentioned we got very large fiscal deficit but more importantly we are doing so many things that are just antagonizing people foreigners to discouraging them to hold our assets right rather it to be be perceived to be behaving irrationally. Whether it to be you know just for example basically having trade policies that are might involve some degree of coercion and so forth and I think there's a sense that the administration doesn't actually want to have the reserve currency because they think that there are people in there that think that the burden that comes with being a reserve currency outweighs the benefits.
And so for this country to be able to have a stronger manufacturing expert sector we need to have a weaker dollar and I think some perceive that reserve currency status is an impediment to having a weaker dollar so I mean if you don't really want to have reserve currency a lot of people do and maybe that will just go to other places who actually do and that's going to take time but we're definitely doing all the right things to move towards that. Yeah it's such a long moving trend I think you you're better suited playing playing things playing other things right in that case because at the end of the day it is if you're playing fiat pairs that's why you plot gold versus every currency and it's it's a kind of straight line up with very few dips you know global bond yields as a similar chart over a longer time horizon eventually this would this would result in the same way.
And so I think that's a lot more commodity price appreciation and you know with these things you get geopolitical issues rising which put scarcity concerns and on your supply chains and commodity resources so I think there's a lot of other ways you play it but it is interesting because for many years every fund or investor asset allocator you know in the US but also broad given how much unhaged dollar exposure there are from foreign investors. Have just assumed the dollar to be this kind of rock and stable currency and in the best of the dirty shirts but yeah the reflexivity of if that changes and how many people need to sort of scrap their plans and rethink creates flows that be get flows and it's a very inflationary outcome for us and it creates these pockets of different kinds of different kinds of different kinds of things.
Different different circumstances where we've benefited from importing deflation via stronger currency and if you go to like a situation where your currency is depreciating 5% your over your for three years or something that's that means in a in a time where we're importing a massive trade trade imbalance that's very inflationary and has more ramifications. Alright so just to wrap this up here just want to talk a little bit about how to navigate from a portfolio standpoint everything we just talked about because to me it just feels like almost every asset class has some sort of land mine associated with it right now whether that's okay I'm going to go on US equities but oh wait the flows are going to go in the opposite direction for the next few years yes we will get these bounces of changes but overall it's likely going in that direction bond yields are looking like they're going to go higher rest of world equity.
Rest of world equity is interesting but then again to your point Joseph geopolitical tensions are much greater tailors for those countries there's also you know way too much regulatory red tape in Europe to be interested in anything technology related there even though they may get those positive flows to me it sort of feels like you're you're left with gold and Bitcoin gold obviously we talked a bit about already and it just it seems like a really solid bet. Bitcoin to but it also has that correlation to risk off so if we do go into these sort of decroasing moments like you talked about when it's going to get hit with that so you got to be managing your risk of really effectively but aside from that I just. I see holes in everything else I'm curious what you guys think.
Yeah I I hate the risk reward for almost every asset and I think like the most money to be made over the next 12 months is probably on the short side of most assets. And I guess you know if you're in cash you're long the dollar and even that is probably not that safe so I think you know inflation protected securities bonds tips like things like that I think in playing the short side I do think like if you if you don't know your currency if you think about your portfolio and you're like I'm dollar based but well maybe I want to be gold based on always long gold or you know changing that up is probably prudent or playing currencies more often than you would to protect your purchasing power in that way.
So I think there's more games to be played there but yeah I mean even Bitcoin you really have to wait till the intervention occurs before the positive read throughs of liquidity make it make it a track. From here because Bitcoin is the liquidity release valve and it powers committing to being three to six months delayed on cutting like that's not an attractive set up either so my my yeah I think like short bond short equities almost and then eventually when the weakness does materialize they will probably cut more than they currently expect and they will turn from hawkish to dovish and and I think that's not going to be a good example.
And in that case I guess the two year note does does really well but yeah there's there's a lot of land mine that's a good way to put it. Yeah so I agree with you guys I think there's a lot of things happening outside so for my subscribers I have a market view portfolio to help people think through about how to position so in that portfolio there's only two things it's cash and gold and hopefully as some of these riskier things materialize and if the currency continues to decline like I think it will. I think there'll be good buying opportunities in the coming months so that's that's something about it now personally I like the short side to yeah sounds good all right well yeah we're out there thanks for guiding Joseph always great to have you on as well. Appreciate you jumping in last I can appreciate that yeah thanks for listening.