The weak US dollar trade is still on – stick with gold

published 6 June 2016

160606-dollar-trade — A weak dollar means strong gold

Janet Yellen, the US Federal Reserve boss, is set to give a talk at lunchtime in the US later today.

Until Friday, that looked like being a big deal for markets. Everyone was on tenterhooks, waiting to hear if the US central bank is likely to raise rates again this side of August.

But it looks like being a bit of a damp squib. In fact, she might be able to wrap it up and sit down before the starters arrive.

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Because after Friday's rotten jobs data, there's next to no chance of the Fed doing anything before September

Why the US jobs report matters

The Federal Reserve has two main jobs (unlike the Bank of England): keep inflation down and keep employment as high as possible.

In our current environment of low inflation and low interest rates, that makes employment the "big picture" indicator that makes all the difference to the Fed's view on the health or otherwise of the economy.

A good jobs number raises the risk that the Fed will put up interest rates. Higher rates all else being equal tend to mean a stronger US dollar, and weaker stockmarkets.

Why's that? Put simply, higher rates tend to attract money to a country to benefit from the more attractive yields. But higher rates also mean tighter monetary policy, which today's liquidity gluttons in the stockmarket really don't like.

Anyway, the latest US jobless data for May was nothing short of awful. The economy added 38,000 jobs. Markets were expecting 160,000. So that's a major dud. On top of that, readings from previous months were revised sharply lower.

The data was partly this bad because of strike action by staff at telecoms giant Verizon. But that still only accounted for 35,000 of the miss. The manufacturing and construction sectors also saw falling employment.

Meanwhile, wage inflation remained steady at 2.5% a year. There's nothing especially wrong with that, but it means the Fed isn't immediately under pressure to catch up with accelerating wages.

None of this necessarily means that the US economy is going down the tubes. As Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics points out, "payroll employment is notoriously volatile and there have been several instances in recent years when the gain has dropped below 100,000, only to rebound strongly the next month".

But the weak reading certainly does provide the Fed with the ideal excuse to delay raising interest rates this month, and probably the next too.

In short, says Ashworth: "That sound you hear is Fed chair Janet Yellen furiously re-writing the speech she is scheduled to give" today.

The weak dollar trade is still on

If nothing else, it would make President Obama look a bit daft if he'd made a big fuss about how important the Brexit vote was, only for the Fed to effectively dismiss any concerns about financial upheaval by raising rates a few days before the big result.

However, July was a different story. Until Friday, investors were pricing in a 70% chance of a rate rise in July. The market has now been forced to pull a very rapid U-turn on its expectations. That probability has now dropped to 30%, and, to be honest, that's probably too high.

The US election is coming up in November. That offers every excuse to avoid taking action too from concerns over political interference to fears over how the "uncertainty" over a particularly contentious election is affecting the economy.

So what does it mean for investors? The long and the short of it is that the weak dollar trade is still on. That also means that the strong gold trade and all that goes with it rising gold miners and the like is still on.

In fact, if you haven't already bought into the weak dollar trade, I'd view this as the opportunity to get into sectors that are likely to benefit broadly speaking, emerging markets and commodities.

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John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.