Kevin Warsh has spent his first months as Federal Reserve chairman trying to get investors to stop watching him and start watching the data. "Market participants are learning to play the ball, not the referee," he said this month. Scott Bessent apparently didn't get the memo. The same week, the Treasury secretary doubled the ceiling on Treasury's long-bond buybacks, to $4 billion an operation, in a direct attempt to push long yields lower. Evercore ISI's Krishna Guha summed up the awkwardness of it: "activist Treasury policy is as material, for good and for bad, as central bank policy." Two officials, same government, pulling on the same rope in opposite directions.
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