Apparently no one really understands how much the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet matters for markets. Jay Powell probably knows a thing or two but avoided the issue almost entirely in his brief but hawkish speech at last week’s Jackson Hole.
As we covered in June, Zoltan Pozsar said that if the current episode of quantitative tightening “were a scene from a movie”, it’d be the one with all the helicopters in Apocalypse Now.
Morgan Stanley strategists chose not to catastrophise, while Société Générale analysts argued in that round of commentary that simply signalling QT’s “schedule and scale” told investors all they need to know.