Stocks broke down.
By late August, Jerome Powell went to Jackson Hole and declared it "time for policy to adjust."
The Fed then surprised with a 50 basis point cut in September, and followed with two more quarter point cuts before year end.
Now, here we are a year later. And Jerome Powell and his colleagues just held rates steady for a seventh consecutive month. And they did so into a jobs report, which, again, came in weak — and this time with major downward revisions.
Once again, Powell is on the cover of Barron's …
And once again, he's in Jackson Hole with a scheduled speech on the docket.
This time, the magazine frames the Jackson Hole moment as critical to Powell’s “legacy” and the "Fed’s independence."
But that framing is revealing.
It implies, if he signals cuts he's caving to the pressure. If he stays hawkish, it’s a display of independence.
Either way, it seems Barron's is telling us what they really believe: the Fed is sensitive to the politics, and therefore, not independent.