MNI FedSpeak Podcasts Hosted by Pedro da Costa | Greg Quinn | Jean Yung

Devlin Capital founder Ed Devlin discusses the outlook for Bank of Canada interest-rate cuts this year and how officials will manage sticky inflation and a weakening economy.

The euro area economy and inflationary dynamics are “still far away from a normal post-pandemic situation,” as supply-side shocks still resonate, the European Central Bank’s Director General for Economics at the Oscar Arce told MNI.
“We are still seeing the persistent effects of the chain of shocks. It is not only the pandemic but it is the pandemic plus the energy crisis the geopolitical uncertainty created by the war in Ukraine but also by the Middle East,” Arce told an MNI podcast, in which he discussed an ECB Occasional Paper on post-pandemic inflation.

The U.S. Treasury market is still vulnerable to bouts of illiquidity and volatility although reforms like central clearing should help, says Samim Ghamami, an economist who is working on the issue at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Emerging markets have shown surprising resilience in the current Fed hiking cycle but must remain vigilant.

Financial market-based measures and surveys proved more reliable than macroeconomic models at estimating the neutral real rate of interest during the abrupt economic fluctuations of the pandemic, European Central Bank economists told MNI, adding that r-star is now at similar levels to pre-Covid times.

Former Fed board governor Kevin Warsh thinks the Fed's signaling of rate cuts this year prematurely loosened financial conditions, making its own job of bringing inflation back to 2% harder.