Today's Post -

I closed out our annual “money manager due diligence week” last week with a luncheon put on by the Economic Club of New York with Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell. He surprised me by saying some things that I was not expecting, and he also said a lot that I could have predicted verbatim (okay, I did predict verbatim) before the speech.

But despite all my earnest desire that the main action in markets let alone the economy not be at the whim of a few unelected academics, the Fed is the major story of markets right now. Their propensity to stay way too loose for way too long followed by a period of being way too tight for way too long is the cyclical and rotational story of our economic and market-oriented experience for 25 years.

We met with nearly twenty money managers last week (across a wide variety of asset classes in both private and public markets). We did not meet with a single one who did not bring up the Fed, the state of monetary policy, the potential direction of monetary policy, and its impact on how they think (and in some cases act).

So let’s jump into the Dividend Cafe where today is all about the Fed, the rubber chicken, and the radicals who stormed the stage before the speech began. Well, actually, we spend very little time talking about the rubber chicken or the people who stormed the stage and delayed the event for fifteen minutes while security and law enforcement did their thing. Those things really happened and were quite upsetting (especially the chicken). But the Dividend Cafe today is all about the actual words of Jerome Powell and what it all means. Off we go.

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