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The big news of the day was the Canadian policy rate hike, but Yellen’s remarks were also important:

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said the U.S. economy should continue to expand over the next few years, allowing the central bank to keep raising interest rates, while also stressing a gradual approach to tightening as the Fed monitors too-low inflation.

“Considerable uncertainty always attends the economic outlook,” Yellen said Wednesday in remarks delivered to the U.S House Financial Services Committee. “There is, for example, uncertainty about when — and how much — inflation will respond to tightening resource utilization.”
…
On monetary policy, Yellen didn’t diverge far from the comments she made at a press conference after the June policy meeting. She sounded slightly more cautious on the inflation outlook, while sticking to an expectation for continued rate hikes and maintaining the initiative to begin reducing the Fed’s balance sheet “relatively soon.”

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.24%, equivalent to 6.81% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.3x. Long corporates now yield a little under 3.85%, so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread is now 300bp, a slight (and perhaps spurious) widening from the 295bp reported July 12.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 12th, 2017 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.