Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Inflation coming up here in four minutes. Michael Ball on deck. But first, Jim Caron joins us from Morgan Stanley. The note is brilliant. We protect the copyright of all of our guests. Get Jim Caron's brilliance from Morgan Stanley. Okay, so you're out at Aeronautical Engineering at Caltech.
And the final trick question on the exam sophomore year, Jim Caron, is what does it mean if the bond markets worry, worry, hand-wringing worry, and Google can do a 100-year bond nine times over subscribed? Jim, I
Chapter 2: What insights does Jim Caron provide on the recent tech selloff?
I've never seen this.
Well, I think it's really a statement on the dispersion that's in the markets right now. So look, there's a lot of volatility that's happening, right? We understand what's happening in the equity markets. But then when we look at the publicly traded fixed income markets, as you're pointing out, the risk isn't necessarily being evenly distributed across all markets.
And Tom, that's good news, okay? Because whenever we go into these types of market events where there's a big repricing in a certain sector, in this case in software, the number one question is always about contagion. Is there contagion into other markets?
and we're seeing firebreaks between the public markets and the private markets, and certainly equities are taking the brunt of this in some way, but we're not seeing broad-based contagion. So I think if there's a silver lining around all of this, I think that's it.
Jim, what do you make about this rotation we've seen out of some higher growth areas, most notably software, into, I don't know, more value parts of the market, maybe even the small and mid-caps? That spooked a lot of folks who thought software and tech broadly was a good place to be.
Well, it's a great example of why you want to have a diversified portfolio, right? So we've come off of a market over the past couple of years that's been highly concentrated. MAG-7, MAG-7, MAG-7. And people just forgot about the other 493, right, in the S&P 500.
And the point here is that if we get this rise in economic growth, this higher productivity, there should be a cyclical broadening of the markets. Look at the ISM data. ISMs are well above 50 right now. Even new orders are around 57. You've got the manufacturing above 52. You've got GDP growth, which is still pretty reasonable. Jobs, market seems pretty stable.
Let's keep our eye on the bigger picture. And the reality here is that I do think that the cyclical broadening of the markets is actually really a healthy sign for more diversified growth.
When you listen to your economics team, is the vector in goods inflation, usually it's a disinflation, and all of a sudden in the last six months, Jim Caron, I got goods inflation and rising inflation. Is that going to reverse and get back to quote-unquote normal?
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Chapter 3: How does Jim Caron assess the risk of contagion in the markets?
I go to a weaker dollar out there, but some real churn in the market as well. And we see it in Jim Caron's space, as they say, in the bond market. Jim Caron with a 10-year yield, 4.07%, with a substantial move over the last two, three days. Can you and Morgan Stanley model a 3.99% 10-year yield?
Well, I mean, it's certainly lower than what we would have expected it to be. It's really a question in terms of how we think the Fed starts to react to this. Does the Fed now start to see a clear runway to cutting rates maybe more aggressively because inflation, as we just saw, is maybe coming down a bit, maybe a bit faster than many people are expecting?
I'm still in the camp that there's maybe one more cut this year, possibly two. And I think that's pretty much well in the price at this point as far as where the two-year Treasury is currently trading. So I think it's going to be very difficult for the 10-year yield to stay below 4% for any material period of time unless you believe there's going to be a significant flattening. And we don't.
We think the curve's going to stay relatively steep around 60 basis points or so.
We welcome all of you across America. Bloomberg Surveillance, commercial-free to the 9 o'clock hour. Michael Ball awaiting us as well. And Veronica Clark will join us from Citigroup here in a moment. Paul Sweeney with Morgan Stanley's Jim Caron.
Jim, this is a pretty eventful week for the Federal Reserve. Lots of data. It's a data rich week. And I guess the takeaway is, boy, we've got a pretty solid labor market. We saw that on Wednesday. And now we've got an inflation environment that continues to be pretty reasonable out there. Boy, the Fed could go either way here. They could sit on their hands or they could cut rates.
How do you think they're going to interpret this week's data?
I think at the moment, they're probably still leaning towards potentially one more cut this year.
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Chapter 4: What factors are influencing the rotation from growth to value stocks?
If the inflation numbers are coming down, but we also have to understand that the unemployment rate did tick down from 4.4% to 4.3%. Now, could that be seasonal? Could that be an aberration? Maybe we need to see a couple of more numbers, which is why I don't think the Fed's going to do anything in the first quarter of this year.
They're going to have to wait until the second quarter, maybe late second quarter. So I think the way the Fed is likely to interpret this is that we have inflation that seems to be stabilizing. That's good news. A labor market that also seems to be stabilizing, but we need a little bit more confidence in that. You brought this point up earlier. What about wages, right?
So I think the big complaint out there, and I did a podcast on this, which was to make a $20 hamburger affordable again. And my point was that the price of that hamburger is not likely coming down. What's going to make it more affordable is that incomes and wages need to start to go up. But they have to go up in a non-inflationary way.
And the way that happens, this is the magic trick that the economy does, is through higher productivity. So higher productivity is the noninflationary speed limit on growth, meaning that you can have higher wages, better growth, but that higher wages doesn't necessarily increase goods inflation or anything like that. That's what productivity does.
Right now, the productivity numbers are accelerating higher. Right. So it is likely if we get a recovery that these incomes and wages can go up without creating the inflation. And that's what makes the $20 hamburger more affordable.
See how clear he does that. Do you know how he learned that? If you're at the Bowdoin Observatory in physics, in February, and it's 20 below zero, and you get the telescope, it's clearer because it's cold air. That's how you get to think that clearly.
It's that bad. And then he says, I got to go out to California to California. Was he smart?
Right out to Caltech as well. Jim Caron, go write a report. He is brilliant at Morgan Stanley. We appreciate Mr. Caron's expertise here.
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