Notes on the Week Ahead

One of the more challenging positions in football is that of place kicker for the visiting team. In theory, the job is simple – boot the ball through the middle of the uprights. However, there is a raucous crowd cheerfully doing its best to distract you. There are often swirling winds or other elements of nature ready to divert the football from its target the moment it leaves your foot.

As we enter the second week of the government shutdown, markets appear unconcerned. Last week, the S&P500 rose to an all-time record high, 10-year Treasury yields edged down and, while the dollar slipped slightly, measures of volatility across stocks, bonds and currencies all remained subdued.

As I get older, my memory gets a little foggier. That being said, I believe it was at lunch at a restaurant near our office on Friday, March 6^th, 2009, when I and the then three other members of the Market Insights Team, Andy, Marlene and Jerry, made a bet. That day, although we didn’t know it at the time, the stock market hit its financial crisis low and the bet concerned how long it would take for the market to recover its losses.

When engaged in the dark arts of foretelling the Fed’s words and actions, I have always adopted what might be called the “prudent economist rule”. What would a prudent economist, serving as a Fed banker, do - assuming that they were armed with a reasonable economic forecast and with due consideration for the Fed’s inflation and unemployment goals and the need to maintain financial stability?

Stocks rallied in the immediate aftermath of Friday’s dismal jobs report, with the S&P500 jumping 0.5% to an all-time high of 6,532 when the market opened at 9:30AM. While this gain faded to a loss by the end of the day, the initial surge can only be rationalized in one way: investors bought stocks in the hope that weak economic data would force the Fed to cut rates more quickly.

American summers, much more so than in the rest of the world, are defined by two bookends: Memorial Day and Labor Day. As a result, the first week in September is always a time to review and plan. This is particularly important for investors this year since, facing a barrage of unsettling political and economic news, on one side, and very solid investment returns, on the other, it’s tempting to ignore fundamentals altogether and leave investments on auto-pilot.

On August 7^th, with little fanfare, the IRS announced that, as part of its phased implementation of the OBBBA, it would not be adjusting W2 or 1099 forms for the current calendar year but would provide guidance and new forms, in due course, for calendar 2026.

This seemingly innocuous statement confirms that we will see in an even larger crop of personal income tax refunds early in 2026 than was anticipated when the OBBBA was passed. These higher income tax refunds should work much like a new round of stimulus checks, adding to consumer demand and inflation pressures early next year.

One of the great challenges of modern life is avoiding distractions.

In our daily lives, we are flooded by breaking news, music on planes, ads in taxis and little numbers, gazing up at us from phone apps, saying that somebody has something to say. In the investment world, we are bombarded by scrolling tickers, new products and jargon, impenetrable financial reports and the analysis of every twist and turn of government policy.

The key, of course, is not to get distracted by things that are not important. One of those things is the money supply.

The inflation temperature is about to rise. It should be a low-grade fever, triggered by tariff impacts but mitigated by low energy prices, declines in shelter inflation and global economic sluggishness. But it should also linger well above the Fed’s 2% target, as the initial impact of tariffs is supplemented by the effects of a weakening dollar, a lack of labor supply and fiscal stimulus in the first half of 2026. It could, of course, be further sustained by another round of fiscal stimulus before the mid-term elections.

This is a particularly challenging time to try to develop and present a balanced view of the economic outlook and its implications for investors. This is partly due to dramatic changes in trade, immigration and fiscal policies that are just beginning to impact the economy, partly due to distortion and mismeasurement in many key economic series and partly due to sharp attacks on the Federal Reserve and, more recently, even government statisticians, that can cloud the judgement of political partisans on both sides.