Trump Will Own The Next Fed But "All Their Models Are In Ruins"

Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

President Trump is expected to nominate the next Federal Reserve chair within a matter of days.

As I’ve explained before, Donald Trump has the opportunity to appoint a higher percentage of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve system at one time than any president since Woodrow Wilson.

President Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act during the creation of the Fed in 1913 when they had a vacant board. At that time, the law said the secretary of the Treasury and the comptroller of the currency were automatically on the Fed’s board of governors. But besides that, President Wilson selected all of the other participating members.

Due to vacancies he inherited and key resignations, Trump now has the opportunity to fill more seats on the Fed’s Board of Governors than any president since then.

That’s pretty amazing when you think about it.

To review, the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors is made up of seven appointees. That means that they can make a majority decision with four votes. If you’re reading about the Fed, you might also see reference to “regional reserve bank presidents.” These are roles within the Federal Reserve System, but the real power is found on seven-member Board of Governors.

Trump will own the Fed.

Meaning, whatever the president wants monetary policy to be, he’ll get. In other words, Donald Trump will be able to shape the Fed’s majority. But the tricky part is figuring out how he plans to shape it...

During the campaign season, Trump called China and other nations currency manipulators. That signaled he believed the dollar was too strong and wanted it to weaken. But then the North Korean nuclear crisis rose to the fore.

Trump backed off his threats against China because China has the most economic influence over North Korea, and Trump wanted China to use that leverage to convince the North to back off its nuclear program.

But China didn’t deliver as Trump had hoped, and a trade war with China is now likely. That’s especially true now. Chinese president Xi Jinping has solidified his hold on power after the Chinese Politburo re-appointed him yesterday. Xi had avoided rocking the boat in recent months while his position was uncertain. But now that his lock on power is secure, Xi can afford to be much more confrontational with Trump.

Trump’s trade policy has led many to believe that Trump will appoint a lot of “doves” to the Board. But don’t be surprised if Trump goes with a hard-money board. In fact, that’s what I expect. These will be hard-money, strong-dollar people, contrary to a lot of expectations.

Trump advisers include hard-money advocates like Dr. Judy Shelton, David Malpass, Steve Moore and Larry Kudlow. I expect Trump to heed their advice.

Which brings us to Janet Yellen and the next Federal Reserve Chair…

Janet Yellen’s term as chair is up at the end of January - just over three months from now. Whoever President Trump appoints to replace her will be subject to Senate confirmation.

Because that process takes time, that means the president has to name Yellen’s successor around November or December.

And again, he’s expected to make that announcement by Nov. 3, before he heads to China.

The market is tightly focused on President Trump’s pick. As of now, betting markets had the approximate probabilities as follows:

Powell’s main qualification seems to be that he’s just like Yellen except he’s a Republican. So, if we combine their votes, that a 68% chance that policy will continue unchanged, which means more rate hikes ahead.

The next in line is John Taylor, who is considered the most hawkish of the group. If we add his votes to the Powell + Yellen pool, that an 85% probability that policy will either be the same or tighter.

No relief for gold in the Fed sweepstakes.

Now, as I’ve been saying for months, my money’s on Kevin Warsh. Warsh is the likely next chair of the Fed.

Warsh has previously served on the board. After being nominated by President George W. Bush he was a Fed governor where he served from 2006 until he resigned early in 2011.

Kevin Warsh is a pragmatist, not an ideologue like Yellen. He’s not beholden to obsolete Fed models like Phillips curve that says low unemployment means higher inflation. Warsh understands that disinflation is a serious problem for a country with a 105% debt-to-GDP ratio, like the U.S.

Warsh and the pragmatists understand that inflation is needed for the U.S. to have any hope of getting the debt problem under control.

Warsh believed that the Federal Reserve should have raised interest rates a long time ago. But with disinflation a much more pressing concern than inflation right now, being a pragmatist means he won’t commit to tightening if conditions don’t warrant it.

We’ll see how this all plays out probably late this week or early next before Trump leaves for China.

But it’s important to realize that institutions boil down to people. And there’s going to be a lot of turnover at the Fed under Trump. It’s not just limited to his choice of Fed chair.

Yes, Yellen will likely be out. But so are Fed officials that align with her, like Vice President Stanley Fischer, who announced his resignation in September.

As I indicated, the new, emerging Fed will have less faith in traditional models. For example, in September, Fed governor Lael Brainard delivered one of the most significant Fed speeches ever. Translating from Fed-speak to plain English, she more or less admitted the Fed has no idea how inflation works.

Brainard pointed out that the Fed began its current monetary policy tightening cycle in the belief that tight labor markets implied inflation was coming with a lag. The Fed raised rates in December 2015, December 2016, March 2017 and June 2017 in part to get out ahead of this coming inflation.

Instead the opposite happened.

The Fed’s favorite measure of inflation plunged from 1.9% to 1.3% between January and August 2017 even as job creation continued and the unemployment rate fell. In other words, the relationship between tight labor markets and inflation turned out to be the exact opposite of what the Fed believed.

Their models are in ruins.

Of course, this is what I’ve been telling my readers to expect all year. The Fed was tightening into weakness, not strength, and would soon have to flip back to ease in order to avoid an outright U.S. recession. And ease is exactly what Brainard called for in her speech.

In the meantime, a lot of uncertainty over the Fed’s direction will hover over the market, as if there wasn’t enough uncertainty in the market already.

But one thing is certain:

The next Fed head will have a lot on his (or her) plate.

The biggest winner will be gold. The time to enter your gold position, if you don’t already have one, is now.

Senate Confirms Steven Mnuchin As Treasury Secretary With 1 Democrat Breaking Party Lines

After nearly a full month has passed since his original confirmation hearing back in mid-January, the Senate has finally voted to confirm former Goldman Sachs banker, Steven Mnuchin, as Trump"s Treasury Secretary, adding one more official former vampire squid to the team of Trump"s "Goldman Guys."  One Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, broke party lines and voted in favor on Mnuchin resulting in a final vote tally of 53-47.  Mnuchin"s confirmation once again puts a Goldman Sachs veteran in charge of the Treasury for the first time since Hank Paulson departed the office in 2009. 

NEW: Senate confirms nomination of Steven Mnuchin to be treasury secretary, 53 yeas to 47 nays https://t.co/Okz2bwUl4f pic.twitter.com/UQsvFb5F52

— CBS News (@CBSNews) February 14, 2017

JUST IN: Senate CONFIRMS @stevenmnuchin1 to be Pres Trump"s Treasury Sec, 53-47.

DEM "YES" VOTE:
Manchin

GOP "NO" VOTE:
None.

— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) February 14, 2017

Per the Wall Street Journal, the delay between presidential administrations in filling the Treasury post for Trump"s administation was the longest in the nation’s history. Moreover, the lack of bipartisan support for a Treasury secretary is unusual.  Previously, the closest vote for the job came in 2009 for President Barack Obama’s first Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who won confirmation on a 60-34 vote with 10 votes from Republicans. His nomination became controversial after disclosures that Mr. Geithner failed to pay some employment taxes in a timely manner.

Given that Mnuchin is being confirmed weeks later than the Treasury Secretaries of previous administrations, he faces numerous immediate challenges including a debt ceiling expiration on March 15th and a meeting of the G20 Finance Ministers on March 17th.  Per Reuters:

Lawmakers, lobbyists and business groups have been waiting for Mnuchin to fill in the many blanks on how he will pursue tax reform and handle delicate economic cooperation efforts with China, Mexico and other trading partners worried about President Donald Trump"s "America First" trade strategy.

Mnuchin faces immediate challenges with the March 15 expiration of a U.S. debt ceiling suspension, ushering in the threat of a new default showdown, and a March 17 meeting of finance ministers from the Group of 20 major economies, where he will face tough questions about Trump"s plans to increase trade protections.

"There is a real open question as to whether this administration is going to cut itself off from international monetary cooperation, whether it"s exchange rate policies or attitudes towards multilateral institutions or international regulatory policy," said Edwin Truman, a former Treasury and Federal Reserve official now with the Peterson Institute for International Economics

Truman said Mnuchin"s hardest job would be managing a sprawling tax reform effort with Congress that seeks to slash business tax rates and enact a new border tax adjustment system aimed at boosting U.S. exports. He noted that was a longer-term project.

With his confirmation now complete, Mnuchin will have to get to work building a team which is expected to consist of several former Wall Street bankers, including David Malpass of Bear Stearns, Jim Donovan of Goldman Sachs and Justin Muzinich of Morgan Stanley.

Treasury and White House representatives did not respond to requests for comment on Monday on reports that Trump would soon nominate David Malpass, a former economist at failed Wall Street bank Bear Stearns, as Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, the agency"s top economic diplomacy job.

Malpass, a Trump campaign adviser who had been leading Treasury transition efforts, was seen as a leading candidate for the job, with experience from international economic posts in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

Other names that have been floated for senior posts include Goldman Sachs banker Jim Donovan for deputy Treasury secretary and Justin Muzinich, a former Morgan Stanley banker, for undersecretary of domestic finance.

With Mnuchin now confirmed, all eyes will anxiously turn toward General Michael Flynn to see whether the embattled National Security Advisor will keep his position in light of recent revelations regarding with his apparently unapproved discussions about sanctions with a Russian ambassador.

Why President Trump Will Fumigate The Fed

Submitted by Tommy Behnke via The Mises Institute,

Starting in January, President-elect Donald Trump will have a unique opportunity to pack the Federal Reserve with hard money officials.

There are currently two open Board of Governors seats, which will most likely not be filled before the end of President Obama’s tenure. Additionally, both Chair Janet Yellen and Vice-Chair Stanley Fischer’s terms will be up by 2018. Crunch the numbers and you will see that Trump has the opportunity to replace a majority of the Board of Governors and a third of the FOMC with monetary policy hawks during his presidency.

Call me crazy, but assuming that the Republican-controlled House and Senate stands behind him, I believe that Trump just may shock the financial world by shifting this country’s monetary policy in a more hawkish direction.

Yes, this is a guy that cheered on the Fed’s easy-money policies in the years before the Great Recession. And yes, Trump did say in May that he is still a “low interest rate person” who will appoint another dove to head the Federal Reserve. Why in the world, then, am I arguing that the Trump administration might possibly install more hawkish members to the central bank?

Repeated Anti-Fed Campaign Rhetoric

For one, Trump’s occasional dovish comments do not match the passion and enthusiasm of his repeated hawkish campaign trail rhetoric. For the past year, the president-elect has been railing against the “false economy” that the Fed has created, as well as the political influence that runs rampant throughout the central bank.

Perhaps Trump’s most scathing attack on the institution came last October, when he insinuated that Fed actions are crippling the middle class without creating any type of benefit to the economy at large.

“[Chairwoman Yellen] is keeping the economy going, barely,” he said. “You know who gets hurt the most [by her easy money policies]? The people that went through 40 years of their life and saved a hundred dollars every week [in the bank].” He then paused and shook his head for added effect before adding: “They worked all their lives to save and now what happens is they’re being forced into an inflated stock market and at some point they’ll get wiped out.”

These anti-Fed talking points were recycled often on the campaign trail. In September, Trump attacked the Fed for putting us in a “big, fat, ugly bubble” and for keeping rates artificially low for political purposes, points that he again repeated in the first presidential debate. The business mogul has also promised to audit the Fed within the first 100 days of his administration and even included a criticism of the central bank in a recent online video ad.

Sound Money Economic Advisers

Team Trump’s economic advisers paint an even more optimistic picture of his future monetary policy. Some of today’s most reasonable mainstream economic voices are included in his inner circle. These names include David Malpass of Encima Global, who co-signed a letter with Jim Grant opposing the Fed’s “inflationary” and “distortive” quantitative easing program; John Paulson of Paulson & Co., who made billions from shorting the housing market before the Great Recession; Andy Beal, a self-described "libertarian kind of guy" who blames the Fed for the credit crisis; and the Heritage Foundation’s Stephen Moore, who told CSIN in 2012 that he is a “very severe critic” of the Fed’s “incredibly easy-money policies policies of the past decade.”

While none of Trump’s economic advisers are by any means Austrians, they are far more hawkish than most of Presidents Bush and Obama’s past economic advisers. Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, has even said that these advisers are pushing Trump to nominate two “hard money” candidates to fill the Fed’s current vacancies.

“A core view of many Trump advisors is that the extended period of emergency policy settings has promoted a bubble in the stock market, depressing the incomes of savers, scared the public and encouraged capital misallocation,” Shepherdson told Market Watch. “Right now, these are minority views on the Fed policymaking committee, but Trump appointees are likely to shift the needle.”

The Mike Pence Factor

Perhaps the best news for Austrians is that reports have indicated Trump may make his running mate the “most powerful vice president in history.” This is good news, because Mike Pence is one of the more hawkish voices in the modern Republican Party.

While in Congress, Pence expressed regular concern that the Fed was deteriorating the value of the dollar. He introduced legislation to end the dual mandate and even talked up a return to the gold standard.

In a high-profile 2010 speech to the Detroit Economic Club, Pence remarked that “while there is no guarantee that [the Fed’s bond-buying] will succeed in reducing unemployment, it is near certain that the value of the dollar will be diluted.” He then went on to say that “the time has come to have a debate over gold and the proper role it should play in our nation’s monetary affairs,” because “a pro-growth agenda begins with sound monetary policy.”

Conclusion

Trump’s election has given hard money advocates the most hope in over 30 years that our nation’s failed monetary policy will be reformed. Mixed with the current hawkish wave that is already percolating in the veins of some FOMC members, Trump’s future appointments can have a huge impact on the central bank’s immediate decision-making. One can only hope that the president-elect will stick to his guns and do the right thing. Regardless of what he does, however, it will surely be a step ahead of what the Hillary Clinton rubber dove stamp would have brought to the trading desks.