MacroScope

Financial markets this will be keenly focused on congressional testimony from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and minutes from the central bank’s April 30-May 1 meeting, particularly given a thin data calendar. The latter may be the more interesting one, since it will offer hints into how far Fed officials are leaning in a direction of curbing the pace of its bond-buying stimulus, potentially late this summer.

The economic backdrop has been just mixed enough to leave policymakers cautious about taking their foot off the gas. Still, if we get a few more months of strength in the labor market, Fed officials may just be able to say “substantial progress” has been made in the outlook for the labor market – their stated precondition for an end to asset buys.

Still, Harm Bandholz at Unicredit says markets should not confuse a debate about tapering bond buys with some immediate reversal of the Fed’s policy of ultra low rates.

Once the Fed talks about the exit (or unwinding/tapering asset purchases), the market is tempted to jump to the conclusion that this indicates an earlier exit. We disagree. The debate about an exit roadmap merely shows that the Fed is doing its necessary due diligence in time. It wants to make sure that it is prepared to do the right steps once the time has come. This debate does not, however, bring the exit a single day closer. In fact, the minutes are likely to show just the opposite, i.e. that at the previous meeting some Fed officials were talking about the possible need to increase the asset-purchase amount even further.

As for the testimony, don’t expect the chairman to make much news, says Roberto Perli at Cornerstone Macro:

All the talk of currency wars is mostly just that – talk. This week’s meeting of the Group of 20 nations at the International Monetary Fund was living proof. Despite speculation that emerging nations would redouble their criticism of extraordinarily low rates in advanced economies, the G20 ended up largely supporting the Bank of Japan’s new and bold stimulus efforts aimed at combating years of deflation.

Mr. currency wars himself, Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega, told reporters Japan’s monetary drive was understandable given its struggle with falling prices and stagnant wages, even if he called for close monitoring of its potential spillover effects.

Outgoing Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney said Japan’s action is consistent with the G20 communiqué that called for countries to refrain from competitive devaluation. Carney, the head of the G20′s Financial Stability Board, takes over the Bank of England in July. His comments echo recent remarks from Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen.

Jonathan Spicer contributed to this post

When the Fed adopted thresholds for its low interest-rate policy last December, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said they would make “monetary policy more transparent and predictable to the public.” But now that the policy is fully in place, it doesn’t seem that the public and the Fed are predicting the same thing at all. Not even close.

In their policy statement following a two-day meeting that wrapped up Wednesday, Fed policymakers removed any reference to date-based policy guidance, saying only that exceptionally low rates would remain in place as long as unemployment remains above 6.5 percent and inflation is not seen to top 2.5 percent. But as recently as December, the Fed’s statement suggested policymakers did not believe those thresholds would be met until at least mid-2015.

The market, as personified by traders ofU.S.short-term rate futures at the Chicago Board of Trade, believes differently. According to CME Group’s FedWatch, which uses fed fund futures prices to estimate market expectations, traders were pricing in a 55 percent chance of a first rate hike by October 2014 – eight months before the Fed’s forecast last month. Threshold-based policy does not seem to have brought the market and the Fed onto the same page – not even to the same year.

David Levy says he is bullish on the U.S. economy long term. But for now, the country is effectively stuck in a “contained depression,” the chairman of the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center told Reuters during a recent visit to our Washington bureau.

Still, things could have been much worse, says the third generation economist. For Levy, the interventions of a large and proactive federal government prevented a repeat of the 1930s.

In this corrective process, the reason we haven’t had a collapse in profits as we had in the Great Depression is we have – what nobody seems to like very much – a big government that’s stabilizing it by just simply running these deficits and being a much more active lender of last resort.

Since the financial crisis, the federal government has implemented a fiscal stimulus plan and the Federal Reserve took to the road of monetary stimulus, actively seeking new routes to revive the U.S. economy.

The private sector, however, has been laggard in adding its muscle to the revival efforts. Private firms have added employees, but very cautiously, and wages are stagnant. Meanwhile, a huge amount of cash sits idle on corporate balance sheets.

“Capital expenditure plans are being retrenched,” notes Dan Heckman, senior fixed income strategist and senior portfolio manager at Minneapolis, Minnesota-based US Bank, with $80 billion in assets under management. “Most major corporations are sitting on tons of cash. They have no appetite for borrowing and credit line utilization is at all-time lows.”

Polling data courtesy of Chris Reese

We’ll know it when we see it. That’s essentially been the Federal Reserve’s message since it launched an open-ended bond-buying stimulus plan that it says will remain in place for as long “the outlook for the labor market does not improve substantially.” Which begs the question: how much larger is the central bank’s $2.9 trillion balance sheet likely to get?

Minutes from the Federal Reserve’s October meeting point to solid support within the central bank for ongoing monetary easing via asset purchases well into 2013.

A number of participants indicated that additional asset purchases would likely be appropriate next year after the conclusion of the maturity extension program in order to achieve a substantial improvement in the labor market.

Of all the questions Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was asked during his press conference on Wednesday, one appeared to pique his interest in particular: Was he being less aggressive as central bank chairman than the advice he dished out to Japan as an academic in the 1990s would prescribe?

It was the second half of the question asked by Binyamin Applebaum and yet the chairman was eager to get right to it: “Let me tackle that second part first,” he began.

Applebaum may have been channeling the Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman, a Princeton colleague of Bernanke’s and critic of Fed policy, who recently argued the Fed chief was being inconsistent and overly cautious.

The Fed appears to have moved away from the notion of additional bond purchases in recent weeks, for a  mix of tactical and practical reasons including:

1. Policymakers worry about venturing any further into uncharted territory.

2. Growth isn’t weak enough to make a clear case for additional monetary easing.

3. Many officials think QE is better at thwarting deflation than boosting employment.

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The possible need for a second economic stimulus seems to be on everyone’s mind these days, but skeptics worry about the possible cost given that the country’s budget deficit is already at a record. On this week’s edition of MacroScope TV, Randall Wray, professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, argued that the cost of inaction could be even higher — an anemic recovery with no end in sight for the labor market’s troubles.