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To: expat_panama
The article is wrong about the scenario it paints, as the likely continuation. It says commodity prices and inflation will ease and the Fed will keep rates at 5%. Only the first of those is correct.

Commodity prices had an enourmous, parabolic move. It was bubble intensity speculation, not justified in scale by fundamentals, and much of it will be unwound. But it was correctly signaling the direction, that inflation is real and has arrived. The Fed is going to keep raising rates because the economy is going to keep growing anyway, while inflation could easily hit 4-5% per year over the next 1-3 years.

5% long rates are not compatible with low inflation when the nominal economy is growing 8% per year and upward. Real interest rates are still very low. The stock market will not like the IR increases, but it will like the growth. Bonds will not have the latter to help them, and are the worst place to be right now. The best short on the board is the 10 year note. You can pull in horns at 7%; it might not stop until 8%.

16 posted on 05/19/2006 9:26:03 PM PDT by JasonC
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To: JasonC
The Fed is going to keep raising rates because the economy is going to keep growing anyway, while inflation could easily hit 4-5% per year over the next 1-3 years.

We've already been topping 4% (cpi yr/yr) but it would seem that to expect us to hang around there for a while would require that today's economy would be a lot like that of the early '90's. 

Off hand, I'd have thought we were in better shape than that, but if inflation actually did hang in at a solid 4-5% then the fed would most probably do what it could to hammer it back down --providing economic growth stays strong.

My bet is the article was good with both commodity prices and inflation easing, but I'm with you on having a few more fed funds hikes.

17 posted on 05/20/2006 8:30:22 AM PDT by expat_panama (There are 10 kinds of freepers; them that manage numbers with a computer, and them that don't.)
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