- U.S. economic data is “uniformly bad to ugly” right now, and the country stands “at the precipice of recession,” according to Moody’s Mark Zandi, but investors are bullish, driving up stock prices—especially in tech—because they are anticipating that the Fed will cut interest rates later this year. However, the Fed may be forced to hold back owing to inflation from President Trump’s tariffs. Traders seem to be ignoring the macro risks today; global markets were broadly up, as were S&P 500 futures this morning.
S&P 500 futures were up 0.74% this morning after the index itself closed up 0.73% yesterday. A lot of that jump came from tech stocks: The Nasdaq Composite closed up 1.21% after a blowout earnings call from Palantir, which added another 3.62%.
The current bullishness on Wall Street is a stark contrast to what economists are seeing in the macro data. Last week’s dismal jobs report being the most recent aspect of that. “We got what I would call an economic data dump last week, lots of data. And they were all uniformly bad to ugly,” Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, said on the Concord Coalition podcast Facing the Future.
Zandi added later, “I set off the alarm bells this weekend in that post, just because once I really sat down and started looking at all the data, I go, ‘Oh, gosh! This economy is really struggling to move forward.’ And thus, ‘at the precipice of recession,’ I think, applies.”
So if the economy is fragile, why are investors buying? Because they are expecting the Fed to step in with interest rate cuts to rescue their bets. (Cheaper money generally turns into stronger demand for equities.)
Goldman Sachs is currently predicting there will now be three rate cuts this year: “A weak U.S. labor market report last Friday (Aug. 1) has raised market concerns over the U.S. economic outlook, driving a significant front-end-led rally in U.S. rates. We see room for this repricing to continue, as our baseline expectation remains for the Fed to cut rates three times this year, and two more times in H1 next year, and we see room for market pricing to shift in excess of that,” Tadas Gedminas told clients in a note seen by Fortune.
His colleague Vickie Chang says that the fundamentals—a bad labor market and declining consumer enthusiasm—are essentially being ignored by stock traders today. “The core risk to growth pricing is something that threatens the market’s belief that it can look through current weakness and discount the prospect of recession,” she said in a research note.
So, cuts from the Fed are in the mail, right?
Not so fast. Zandi is gloomy about that, too. President Trump’s tariffs and his restrictive immigration policy “raise inflation and weaken economic growth. So if you’re at the Fed and you have a dual mandate to maintain full employment, economy, and low and stable inflation, that gets pretty difficult. How do you respond to that? And the answer is, you do nothing, and that’s exactly what the Fed’s doing.”
He’s also predicting a bond market selloff, so … fingers crossed, everybody!
Here’s a snapshot of the action prior to the opening bell in New York:
- S&P 500 futures were up 0.48% this morning, premarket, after the index closed down 0.73% yesterday.
- STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.5% in early trading.
- The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was down 0.33% in early trading.
- Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 0.65%.
- China’s CSI 300 was flat.
- The South Korea KOSPI was up 0.92%.
- India’s Nifty 50 was down 0.48%.
- Bitcoin rose to $114.9K.
