Hello my friends, today is June 15th and this is Markets Weekly. So this past week was a great weekend markets. We were making new all-time highs almost every single day. But at the moment, I'm pretty cautious though I continue to believe that the highs of the year are not yet in. Okay, so today I want to talk about three things.
First, this past week we got a whole bunch of inflation data and it was all really positive. So let's talk about what the data is saying and how the market is interpreting it.
Secondly, there's been some big political changes in Europe and it's scaring parts of the market. So let's talk a little bit about what's happening in France.
其次,欧洲发生了一些重大的政治变化,这让市场的某些部分感到恐慌。那么让我们谈谈法国发生了什么。
And lastly, it seems like the Bank of Japan is finally, finally going to be shrinking its balance sheet by conducting quantitative tightening. So let's talk a little bit about what's going on over there.
Starting with inflation. So this past week, we got a whole bunch of inflation data and it was all pretty good. The good news started Wednesday morning right before the Fed meeting. At that time, we got the CPI data and on a month-over-month basis, headline CPI was 0% and of course CPI was 0.2%.
Now on an annual basis, CPI continues to print above 3%, definitely too high, but you can see that over the past several months, CPI has been moderating. Now, to be clear, the Fed targets PCE and not CPI. So PCE is another measure of consumer inflation. But part of the data in CPI feeds into PCE. So when you have good CPI prints, it's just good news for PCE.
Now, the past week on Thursday, we got PPI data. Now, PPI is basically prices paid by businesses and PPI data was across the board lower than expected. On Friday, we got import prices and they were also lower than expected. So we got a bunch of positive inflation prints. And what does that mean for them all important PCE coming out later in the month?
Now, the Cleveland Fed has a very nice inflation now casting page and it's taking all that data and suggesting that PCE will print at about 2.6%, which would be an improvement from 2.7% last month. Note though, that core PCE looks pretty sticky, but at least headline PCE is moderating.
Now, the market is taking a look at all this positive inflation data and is suggesting that the Fed is going to be a bit more dovish than it projected. Remember, on Wednesday, using the dot plot, the Fed guided towards one cut this year, but at the moment, the market is actually pricing in two cuts this year. And this is very volatile and it could all change with new data.
But the, I guess, the pricing of two cuts is in part contributing to lower interest rates and I think is also a tailwind for risk assets the past week.
但是,我想,两次降息的定价部分导致了利率下降,我认为这也是过去一周风险资产的一个利好因素。
The second thing I want to talk about is the big political changes happening in Europe. So this past week, we had European elections and looking at France, it looks like the Rassemblement National, the right-leaning party in France, is totally crushing President Macron's party, Bussuander up.
And so when you look at this, you're saying that, well, there's a lot of discontent in France as there is in many countries. Now, President Macron looked at these results and he called for new legislative elections and that call for new elections surprised many people and opens the door to some big political changes in France where potentially the right-leaning parties could have a lot more power in the legislature.
So just looking more into this a bit more, why are the people so upset and what is the right-leaning party the Rassemblement National offering? So it looks from the platform that their biggest concern that they're addressing is immigration. In France, as in the US, there's been tremendous amounts of immigration and a lot of people don't like it.
Other things that they are addressing are, of course, inflation. So inflation, again, has been high in the US but also high in Europe, particularly because of the Russian-Ukrainian War pushing up energy prices. So they're looking to reduce some taxes to try to increase the income of the average person. And of course, they're also trying to address retirements.
So President Macron raised the retirement age and it looks like they would like to have some changes there to basically improve the living standards of the retirees. Now, the market is looking at this election chaos and it's not happy. So it's not happy for a couple reasons.
Of course, there's tremendous amounts of uncertainty. No one knows what's going to happen. Markets are a bit surprised. But also, the Rassemblement National is ultimately a populist party and that's just a lot more deficit spending. Now, President Macron himself has overseen tremendous amounts of deficit spending just a few months ago. You can see that the fiscal deficit in France was 5.5%, which is very high.
In the US, of course, we're at 6 and 7% but 5 or 5% is historically quite high over there. The difference though is that in the US, at the end of the day, we have the Fed. We are a monetary sovereign. Fed can almost always finance it all. Or if you look at the case in the UK, a year ago, we had Lid's Trust Prime Minister at the time announced large spending. The bond market didn't like it and basically sold off aggressively. And at the last moment, of course, the Bank of England was able to ride into the rescue and buy a whole bunch of guilds to stabilize the market. Now, in the context of the European Union, France is not really a monetary sovereign. It's monetary policy. It's controlled by the ECB, which is another layer of bureaucracy. Decisions made by the ECB are done through a council involving all sorts of other countries.
They have special programs to address dislocations in the debt market. But again, it's another layer of bureaucracy. So what the market seems to be looking at is that there is a possibility of tremendous amounts of deficit spending, putting upward pressure on interest rates, and potentially some dislocation in the bond market. So let's look at the stock market, for example. Over the past week, we saw the DAX, the German stock market, sell off. But when you look at the French stock market, it really plummeted. People are not liking what they see. But the more concerning episode is, in the bond market, we see French sovereign bonds yield as a spread to German bonds, really whining out a bit.
And that, of course, is also bleeding into other sectors. For example, looking at the credit default swaps for the French financials, that's also whining a bit as well. Again, if you have sovereign credit risk rising, you are also going to have the private sector credit risk rising as well. Can euros sort off this past week as well? Now, the strange thing is that what's happening in Europe is actually having some impact on US markets. So French is actually home to a few large banks, a SOC Gen BNP credit act that are also pretty large players in US markets, in markets like the repo market. And so it seems like that's having some effect on some things we see in US markets. And I will write about the connections this week. It's not a big deal so far.
But going forward, if this deteriorates, it could easily reverberate to US markets. So it looks like we're going to have two rounds of elections in France. And so this is something that will play out over the coming weeks. Again, big changes happening in Europe and come November, maybe big changes happening in the US as well. As we discussed last week, I think going forward politics is going to play a much bigger role in markets than whatever the central banks do. Okay, the last thing that I want to talk about is the Bank of Japan. So let's just level set a little bit. So in Japan, as the rest of the world, inflation shot up a lot during the pandemic and now has trended lower. Unlike other countries, though, Japan has been struggling with this inflation for decades.
And so they were really happy to see inflation emerge. So happy that they basically didn't do anything with their stance of monetary policy until very recently. So whereas the Fed funds rate, the Fed has hiked to around 5.5%. The Bank of Japan only recently hiked its interest rates from negative to zero. So they're a lot slower in their tightening process. But it seems like Governor Wado is more comfortable with the path of inflation thinking that, you know, maybe we don't really have to worry about falling back into disinflation anymore. He seems to be more comfortable that inflation is going to be around the 2% target for the next few years. So he's contemplating additional normalization in the stance of policy. So right now, what he seems to be discussing is potentially another rate hike, but also though, reducing the amount of bonds he's purchasing.
Now, the Bank of Japan has been a huge, huge, huge buyer of Japanese government bonds. And the continuity of be purchasing them right now. But if the Bank of Japan were to reduce their purchases though, as past purchases mature, then there's going to be a net decline in the holdings of JGVs. And so that in effect would be a form of quantitative tightening. Again, the amount rolling off exceeds the amount they continue to buy as they're guiding towards reducing their purchases maybe next month. Now, the Bank of Japan is vague on just the exact size of their reduction in purchases. So we'll find out more. But that suggests, of course, an ongoing normalization. And if you look at Japanese markets, GGB yields have been surging the past few months right now, just a little bit below 1% recall the Bank of Japan was under yield curve control for some time and only recently relaxed that.
Looking at the Japanese yen, it's been selling off, of course, aggressively over the past few months, but seems to be finding some resistance just below 160. Bank of Japan did intervene not too long ago spending $62 billion. But if they continue to normalize policy, then maybe they won't have to intervene anymore because higher interest rates in Japan will strengthen the yen. Now, it seems like part of the reason the Bank of Japan wants to continue to normalize policy is that the week yen is having a larger than expected impact on their inflation. So that's probably one of the reasons why they'd like to have a bit tighter monetary policy that, of course, remains a common data. So we'll find out more about this in July. Again, I think there's a lot of people selling the yen. So this could potentially be an event that moves markets as people potentially get off sites by a more hawkish than expected Bank of Japan. Don't know if that's going to happen. Find out in the coming weeks.
All right, so that's all I prepared for today. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you're interested in hearing my thoughts, I have a weekly research piece I published at my blog, FedGuy.com. And of course, if you're interested in learning more about markets, check out my online courses at centralbanking101.com. Talk to you all next week.