I said my peace on what I consider to be the big market stories last week, so I won’t belabour bonds and equities too much this week. FX markets, however, could well be the driver of the NarrativeTM in the next few months, at least judging by the rustling of the grapevine. This story starts with the notion of the “global Fed,” which is not a new idea at all. Fed watchers tend to pivot between two extremes in their analysis of, and forecasts, for U.S. monetary policy. In one end, Fed conducts itself according to the reality of a relatively closed U.S. economy, without regard to the impact of its policy on the rest of the world, and the value of the dollar. At the other end, the Fed acts according to its role as a warden of the global reserve currency, taking into account the impact of its policy on the rest of the world. A more cynical version of this story is the idea that the Fed, in a world of free capital mobility, is constrained by the fact that other major central banks, in economies with large external surpluses, are stuck at the zero bound. This could happen in practice as tighter monetary policy in the U.S. drives the value of the dollar higher and/or leads to an increase in capital inflows. Both likely would drive up the external deficit, which would probably be counterproductive in an environment when the Fed would otherwise want to raise rates to curb inflation pressures.
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