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...gloom-and-doom scenario, the Federal Reserve Board will not be satisfied with such modest rate hikes. In order to nip in the bud any renewal of inflation, the Fed will begin an aggressive tightening of credit and deliberately push interest rates much higher still. That will cause a chain reaction. It will knock stock and bond prices much lower, make consumer buying and business investment more difficult to finance, and maybe put a stop to what is about to become the longest economic expansion in U.S. history...
Relax. That won't happen. This specter is no more real than the many others that stock and bond traders torture themselves with every now and then, especially when times are good. In fact, inflation is likely to revive only slightly, if at all. The Fed may not tighten at all, and if it does, it will most likely be with a small, one-shot move that's already been discounted. Interest rates a year from now may well be lower than at present...
...hasn't the Fed officially warned that it has a "bias" toward making money and credit tighter? Yes, allows the board, but the Fed may already have accomplished as much tightening as necessary--or maybe more--by subtle measures. True, it may kick up the "Fed funds" (very short-term) interest rate it controls by a modest quarter percentage point at its rate-setting meeting at the end of June--"just to prove it can do it, for practice," in Farrell's words. But such a move has been so widely expected, and discounted, that board members think...
...even as high as they are now, says Charles Clough, chief investment strategist of Merrill Lynch, is "the bond market's proclivity to identify growth with inflation." But that proclivity, in the board's opinion, is simply wrong: there is no inflation threat scary enough to push the Fed into drastic action. Prices did spike abruptly in April, but that, says Clough, was due largely to a speculative rise in industrial commodity prices that "has already lapsed." Though Asian countries are starting to recover from the crisis that knocked demand and commodity prices so far down in 1998, recovery...
Alan Greenspan, party pooper, is back on the job. The morning after the Dow and NASDAQ each threw triple-digit shindigs over May?s sleeping-dog inflation number, the Fed chairman told Congress ?- and, of course, the intently listening markets ?- to keep the music down just a little bit. "When we can be preemptive, we should be, because modest preemptive actions can obviate the need of more drastic actions at a later date that could destabilize the economy," he told the Joint Economic Committee. Folks, that?s as clear as the man gets without actually saying it: The Fed will...