- Today's monetary policy report from the Federal Reserve discusses a number of issues that helps it decide how to formulate monetary policy. Here are a few highlights:
- In the private nonfinancial sector, borrowing by highly levered and lower-rated businesses remains elevated, although the ratio of household debt to disposable income continues to be moderate.
- Housing market has leveled off this year.
- In the financial sector, vulnerabilities stemming from leverage remain low, partly reflecting strong capital positions at banks. Some measures of hedge fund leverage, though, have increased.
- "Vulnerabilities associated with maturity and liquidity transformation among banks, insurance companies, money market mutual funds, and asset managers remain below levels that generally prevailed before 2008,"
- Q1 consumer spending has picked up in April an May, with personal consumption expenditures rising at an annual rate of 2.25% compared with consumer spending growth of 0.9% annual rate in Q1.
- Net exports had roughly neutral effect on real U.S. GDP growth in Q1.
- There was no discussion in the the report about how recently announced tariffs could affect economic growth.
- U.S. 10-year Treasury yield down about 1 basis point to 2.831%, while 2-year yield falls 3 basis points to 2.574%, bringing the spread to almost 26 basis points, a tad wider than 24 bps late yesterday.
- ETFs: TLT, TBT, TMV, TBF, EDV, TMF, TTT, ZROZ, VGLT, TLH, UBT, SPTL, DLBS, VUSTX, TYBS, DLBL, OPER
- Now read: 3% Treasury Yields Still Don't Matter
Original article