Hello my friends, today is August 26th, my name is Joseph and this is Markets Weekly. Now before we begin, I have to point out that this channel now has 10,000 subscribers. I want to thank you sincerely for all that your love and support. Watching this channel grow is really encouraging to me and it makes me want to produce the best content that I can for you. So thank you very much.
Okay, now let's start with our regular programming. So this week, we're going to talk about three things. First, we have to go over what Chirpahl talked about at his Jackson Hole keynote speech and why I think it was a hawkish speech. Secondly, we'll talk about the big BRICS conference this past week and what it might mean for the US dollar. And lastly, I want to give an update on the housing market based upon what I hear from the home builders at their earnings conference calls and why I think housing is going to remain strong even as mortgage rates trend higher.
Okay, starting with the Fed. So this past week, we had our big annual Jackson Hole conference. What the Jackson Hole conference is is that central bankers around the world fly into Jackson Hole, Wyoming and basically have a big party. They go and they chat with each other and sometimes they also give market moving speeches. Now, if you've ever been to Jackson Hole, then you can see at least from the TV images that it's a really nice place, highly recommended.
So Jay Powell was there and he gave a speech that sounded very much like the things that he was talking about in the past. First off, he looked at inflation and he noted that there was progress being made, but the job is not yet done. He broke inflation down into three segments, goods inflation, housing inflation and non-housing services. And he noted that goods inflation has come down. He's pretty sure that housing inflation is going to come down now that non-housing services, that looks pretty sticky, but it's largely a reflection of wages. And he's looking at wages, wage growth is trending lower, and he's thinking that that is going to trend lower as well. So all in all, he's noting that a lot of progress has been made on the inflation front, but things aren't yet done.
Now, what really caught my eye in this speech was his comments on the real economy. So he noted that if the economy continues to grow above trend, and if basically economic data continues to be strong, then there's a risk and inflation might re-accelerate, so he'll have to keep hiking again. Now, for context, the Fed thinks that the economy trend growth for the economy is about 1.8%. In the first quarter of this year, we grew at 2%. Second quarter, we grew at 2.4%. And this quarter, we're looking like we're even growing even faster. At the same time, last week, we got consumer spending data that's strong, and we see that housing, which we want to talk about later, appears to re-accelerate. So the Fed hydrates a lot, thinking that the economy would slow, and thus drag inflation down. But the economy hasn't really been slowing. In fact, it looks like it's re-accelerating. And so if that continues, then the Fed is probably going to have to hydrates again.
So let's rewind a bit and recall what happened at their June Fed meeting. At the June Fed meeting, Fed officials, based upon their projections of the economy at that time, guided towards two-way hikes this year. Now, data has been coming in stronger than expected, so from my perspective, it still makes sense to hike one more time this year. And that's what the market priced into after Chair Powell's speech. The market priced in a slightly higher probability of rate hikes later in the year. So maybe in December, we'll see. But I think that's the right interpretation.
Now, the other thing that struck me in this speech was Chair Powell categorically affirmed that the Fed has a 2% inflation target. Now, this is likely in response to a lot of discussion this past week about the potential of the Fed changing their inflation target to maybe 3%.
Now, Jason Furman, who was a very influential and smart economist, penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, noting that, hey, maybe 3% inflation is not so bad. And from my perspective, no, he's totally reasonable. But the Fed obviously can't say that because the Fed would risk from their perspective, destabilizing inflation expectations. The Fed looks at the world through the lens of inflation expectations. And they think that if the Fed clearly commits to a target, then inflation expectations will be stable. And if everyone expects inflation to be stable, then inflation actually will be stable. That's not necessarily how the world works, but that's how the Fed thinks about it. And so the Fed is never going to wave on their inflation target. But what you want to keep in mind is that the Fed is independent within the government, but not of the government. So if the popular culture, if the politicians, if the public is agitating for a higher inflation target, because they'd rather accept higher inflation than losing their job, if that's the popular choice, then the Fed is going to accept that, because the Fed obviously serves the public. So I don't think that this is going to happen immediately. But in the future, I'm guessing that culturally speaking, I think the American public would rather have higher inflation than to lose their jobs. And so I think that's a real possibility in the coming years to have a higher inflation target than the 2% we have now.
Okay, now let's talk about the next topic, BRICS. So this past week, the BRICS would BRICS stands Brazil, India, Russia, China, and South Africa, which is a group of developing countries who have historically had large or high growth rates. They had their big conference. And the big news was that they are seeking to enlarge BRICS. They're inviting other countries like Saudi Arabia and Argentina to join. And it looks like those countries will join. So what this seems to be is a geopolitical play where countries who are not as happy with the US-led Western order want to have their own counterbalanced to the Western world order.
Now, this has a whole bunch of implications for trade and politics, but let's talk about one aspect of it. And that is the role of the dollar. Now, one of the things that these guys talk about is having at their own BRICS currency, or at the very least, being able to make payments to each other, not with a dollar, but with their own currencies. So to be perfectly clear, the dollar right now is in a very strong position by any statistics that you can see that the world, international trade, for example, is largely conducted in dollars. If you look at other measures, let's say ethics trading or the issuance of international data, the dollar is very dominant. So the dollar is in no threat of being displaced at the moment. But let's look at this from a longer term perspective. No currency is a dominant currency forever.
So how might this little BRICS experiment evolve? So first off, I would be, I would just completely dismiss the idea of having a BRICS currency. Now, we have something, an experiment like that. It's the Euro, right? You have all these different countries and they use the same currency. And that led to some problems before you had Germany, for example, which had a strong economy. It was arguing for tighter monetary policy in New York countries like Italy and Spain and Portugal who had weaker economies arguing for a looser monetary policy. So there's a lot of friction involved. Now, a BRICS currency would be a complete disaster. You'd have these countries are not just share a different cultural heritage, but they're also very far apart. I mean, can you imagine China being happy with Argentina having an influence on their monetary policy? I don't think so. But what I do think this could evolve into is greater use of their own currencies when it comes to trade.
So right now, the dollar is about 50% of international trade is invoicing the dollars. So for example, if you are a company in India wanting to buy something in Argentina, chances are that you're going to be paying in dollars. And part of this is simply because there's this very strong international dollar network. Now, if you are a bank in India, you probably don't have a Argentine peso business. And if you are a bank in Argentina, you probably don't have an Indian-Rupia business. But what you will have though is a dollar business. So there's this huge dollar network where payments basically are in dollars and go through this huge banking network that is at the end of the day centered around the Fed.
Now, this works, but in the past few years, it's also been a source of tension because the US has been more and more willing to use their control over this dollar payments network to enforce their political will. For example, a big thing the US does is something called money laundering and all sorts of sanctions. So for example, when the US doesn't like Iran, for example. And when it found out that one of the big French banks was actually processing payments on behalf of Iran, they got really mad and find this French bank a tremendous amount of money.
Now, if you're a bank in France, you should be like, hey, man, this is my business. Why are you stepping in? But because you use a dollar, you use a dollar payment network. And so you basically are under the control of the US. And many countries don't like this. They also saw what happened to Russia during the Russia-Ukraine war where Russia basically got cut out of the international payments infrastructure. There's a real risk there that other countries don't like.
So, so far, it's been really hard to circumvent this structure simply because the dollar network is so well established. Now, there are new technological developments that make it easier for countries like the BRICS to circumvent this system. For example, the Bank of International Settlements is developing something interesting called the project M-Bridge. And what that is, it's basically a huge ledger technology where foreign central banks are all on the same ledger and make payments on that ledger.
So, for example, through project M-Bridge, let's say, the central bank of India and the central bank of China would be on the same, let's say, same ledger. And because you're on the same ledger, they can process payments on behalf of their banks, who in turn can process payments on behalf of their clients. And so, they wouldn't really need the dollar as a common payment infrastructure as a common ledger. They could actually rely on this new technology.
It's always hard to build new payment networks. For example, let's say that you are trying to come up with a new credit card company. Well, how are you going to compete with MasterCard or Visa? They're already accepted everywhere. If you go and you start with your new payments networks, no one's going to want to use it because it's not accepted everywhere. But if you have the official sector involved, though, I think that's a whole another story. You can easily see a world where bricks sign on to some kind of technology like this, and then mandate all their companies and banks to also use the same technology. And so, in that sense, you could actually have this network effect be recreated right pretty quickly. And it wouldn't involve a new currency, of course. It'd just be Indian companies paying with Rupee to the Argentine sellers. But because of this new payments technology, the Indian company pays their rupees, then their bank in India goes to the Indian Central Bank, who then goes to this common ledger, passes out payments with the Central Bank of Argentina. And Central Bank of Argentina goes to their local bank, who then goes to the Argentine seller's account. So, you could have this new infrastructure that could potentially accelerate a move away from the dollar. No, totally, totally, to be clear, this is in its early stages, and these things happen slowly. But one thing to keep in mind is that because of these technological developments, and because of the strong political will, it could happen faster than you expect. So, let's keep an eye out on this development.
Now, the last thing that I want to talk about is housing. Now, a year ago, we saw mortgage rates rise, everyone was expecting the housing market to crash, and it didn't happen. Now, to be totally clear, the housing market is strong. Now, let's look at some data. Let's look at, for example, construction jobs. Now, you would expect, let's say, if you were a traditional cycles guy to say, oh, well, mortgage rates up, construction down, layoffs, recession.
But look here, there's really no layoffs in the construction sector, and it actually appears to continue to grow. Home prices, if you look at the case, still a national price index, continue to rise. So, housing is doing fine, and of course, you can look at the stocks and hold the major publicly traded builders, and you also see that they are doing wells as well.
So, why is housing so strong, and is it going to remain strong? So, I'm going to, I think, go a little bit more in depth in this, to try to help you guys understand what's happening. Now, a very common story, and one that is totally legitimate, is that because there's a whole bunch of people locked into low mortgage rates, they don't want to sell, there's not a lot of inventory. And so, because there's not a lot of inventory, there's not a lot of supply, and so, house prices remain supported. That's definitely true.
But there's a couple other things to note as well. So, when you're thinking about housing, I think it's important to realize that housing has, so just looking at new construction, has a few segments. You have the first time home buyers, let's say someone who was just getting their first home, got married, has a family, and they want a house, okay?
You have the move-up buyer, so someone, maybe it's in the middle of their career, maybe want some more space, maybe it is trying to get into their luxury segment or something like that. And you have the active adult segment, so you have the boomers who have these, you know, their children moved out, they're going to downsize, maybe they're going to buy a house somewhere else, closer to where their adult children are.
Now, among these three segments, now they all have different dynamics. Boomers, obviously, they rode the home price appreciation wave up during the past few decades, they have tremendous amounts of equity into their home. When they buy things, they don't need a mortgage, they would just sell their house and they'll buy another one. So, when you're looking at high mortgage rates, they don't really care about that. So, that's one reason why you can still have strong home sales.
Let's look at the move-up home buyers. The move-up home buyers, well, you know, they have some wealth, now they're going to, they're not going to be able to afford as much as they could when mortgage rates were high, but you know, they do have some wealth built up over time. And, you know, if they're middle age, they also have boomer parents that are in the process of retirement. So, they're going to have some inheritance as well. So, these guys are somewhat affected by mortgage rates, but also, keep in mind that the soft market has gone up a lot, they're in the middle of their career, higher income earning potential. So, that helps a bit as well.
Now, the first time home buyer segment is obviously the segment that's going to be impacted the most by higher mortgage rates. So, what I would say to this is that a lot of these first time home buyers have been buffered by from these high mortgage rates because the home builders have been offering rate buy downs. So, when you go and buy in a house, usually the home builder will offer you all sorts of incentives. They could give you closing costs or maybe give you some free upgrades. So, they have these, you know, they have this incentive money that they can spend. Right now, they're spending it on buying down mortgage rates. So, for example, let's see mortgage rates of 7%, maybe the builder offers the buyer a 6% mortgage rate and the buyer is able to accept that.
Now, home builders are reporting very wide profit margins higher than they were, not as high as they were at the peak, but still higher than pre-pandemic. And so, they can easily afford to buy, do these rate buy downs and also keep in mind that material costs have come down, number prices, for example, have declined and so that's helping them on their margins. So, this is actually something that looks like it can continue, right? High mortgage rates don't necessarily mean housing collapse because many people are insulated from it and don't care about it.
Now, the second thing that I would note about housing is something that many people have talked about and I think I'll use the words of toll brothers, CEO, toll brothers, as a major home builder to explain it. Buying a house for people besides Marty Connor or CFO is not a direct financial decision. It's a family decision. It's emotional. It's moving all of your life. It's getting the kids in the better school. It's moving down as an empty nester. It's buying the second home and all of that wins. It trumps the strength financial calculation on a back of a napkin and where do they go? They may start on a resale market. They can't find anything.
So, as we see, buying a home is a life that is not really purely a financial decision. Sometimes, you're just at a point in life where you need a home. If let's say prices are high, mortgage rates are high, maybe you don't buy as big a home as you wanted. Maybe you don't buy in the neighborhood that you dreamed of, but you still do it. And so, if you have this huge demographic shift where millennials are finally coming of age, whether you want to buy homes, then that's going to continue to be supportive of home markets.
So, I think if you weren't expecting a crash in single-family homes, I don't think that's going to materialize. Okay, so that's all I prepared for this week. If you like what I'm producing, remember to like and subscribe. And if you're interested in learning more about the financial markets, check out my blog, saidgri.com, and free, some free macro courses at centralbanking101.com. Thanks so much and talk to you next week.