From left: Fed officials Jerome Powell, Lael Brainard, and John Williams ponder the great outdoors during a break at the economic symposium at Jackson Hole.
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
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Grand Teton National Park has a stark warning for visitors to the Wyoming mountain oasis. “Bears are active,” it says on its website. “Travel in groups of three or more, make noise, and carry bear spray,” is the official advice.
You have to wonder if Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was hit with bear spray when he arrived at the park for his Friday morning talk at the annual Jackson Hole economic symposium, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
Wall Street spent all of this past week fretting over what Powell would say Friday morning. Worries that he’d take a hawkish tone dampened the rip-roaring summer rally that drove a 20% bull-market rise in the Nasdaq Composite from mid-June to mid-August. June-quarter earnings turned out to be just meh, rather than flat-out terrible, and there was fleeting optimism the Fed might wrap up its tightening cycle sooner than previously expected. But headed into Friday’s talk, two worrisome trends developed. First, interest rates stopped falling, with the 10-year Treasury’s yield climbing back above the 3% level, a sign that investors see further substantial hikes ahead. Second, we got not-so-great earnings from companies with quarters ending in July.
That was particularly true in the tech sector.
Dell Technologies
(ticker: DELL) late Thursday slashed its outlook for the full year, citing slowing…
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