Interesting TACs of the Week (March 16 – March 22, 2026)

 

Summary – A top-down review of interesting calls and comments made last week in Treasuries, monetary policy, economics, stocks, bonds & commodities. TAC is our acronym for Tweets, Articles, & Clips – our basic inputs for this article.

Editor’s Note: In this series of articles, we include important or interesting Tweets, Articles, Video Clips with our comments. This is an article that expresses our personal opinions about comments made on Television, Tweeter, and in Print. It is NOT intended to provide any investment advice of any type whatsoever. No one should base any investing decisions or conclusions based on anything written in or inferred from this article. Macro Viewpoints & its affiliates expressly disclaim all liability in respect to actions taken based on any or all of the information in this article. Investing is a serious matter and all investment decisions should only be taken after a detailed discussion with your investment advisor and should be subject to your objectives, suitability requirements and risk tolerance.

 

1.”A stitch in time saves nine“, doesn’t it? But is that essentially unimportant to the Fed?

Google informs that,

• “A stitch in time saves nine” means that fixing a small problem immediately prevents it from becoming a much larger, more difficult, or costly issue later. It emphasizes proactive, timely action over procrastination.

Look at how the US economy was described 5 weeks ago:

• “… the economy overall is weaker than was anticipated here; the Job market, barely growing; housing industry being a mess; personal consumption and investment spending – together they are growing just barely over 2%; that used to be the stall speed for the economy” 

When we at Macro Viewpoints saw this reality at that time, we used a small stitch to cut our own MV Over-Night Rate to 3%. What do timely or even-pre-timely easings do? They add liquidity to the economy & markets and lower the risk of a slowdown. And they tell the participants that there is indeed focus on the middle+lower tier Americans.

The Powell Fed probably scoffs at such a timely approach. So they procrastinated. And they kept speaking about being data dependent. That is why Powell found himself in a tricky position this week in having to choose between helping American families & workers with lower rates vs. fighting inflation despite negative impact on jobs in his FOMC presser on March 18, 2026. So he kept saying “we don’t know” over & over again. Why didn’t he stop at that?

Because the sad reality is that the Fed cares above all about their mythical “credibility”. And to protect that, they have always preferred to let the economy fall into a slowdown or even a recession before they come in & add liquidity. This is equivalent to the Knights of old allowing young damsels to be brutalized before they ride in after the fact to brandish their weapons for the show. 

This is why the Bernanke Fed stayed on the sidelines for 3-4 months in 2008 while carnage swept thru the financial system that year. Then after Lehman fell & TARP was signed, they rode in with 200 bps of rate cuts in the next 3 months.

Chair Powell is on the same track. He cares far more about following the wishes of his powerbase and talking about his own battles with the President instead of focusing on the economic pressures being forced on the majority of Americans and the US GDP. It is an extreme condition indeed when Bloomberg’s Tom Keene is feeling & expressing what we feel about “demand destruction” in the US economy, a fancy expression that says the majority of Americans can’t afford what they need for their families. 

Read the exchange below between Jonathan Ferro & Tom Keene of Bloomberg & Jeff Rosenberg of BlackRock at about what BlackRock says in Bloomberg’s post-presser coverage at minute 18:43:

• Ferro – So I’ll ask you about the substance of the news conference, the shock from the Middle East and whether it threatens to upend the outlook for this economy.”
• Rosenberg – really his answer to the question …. hey, aren’t you more worried about the employment outlook? And he definitively said no to that and then pivoted to the challenge on inflation. And from my reckoning and the meeting, that was the point at which the meeting turned hawkish because the majority of the discussion around the meeting is around inflation, whether it was the tariff inflation not coming down as much as expected, the unknown impact of energy prices on future inflation. …. And so that really, I think, pivoted the market reaction to this – “Fed is much more hawkish, the front end flattening, the equity markets responding”. And that was the moment in the meeting where this moved from what had started out as a kind of dovish statement interpretation holding the wall or dissent to the side for a second into a definitively hawkish press conference. …. Rate risk assets are going down and I think they’re going down because of the pricing in of  a more hawkish Fed. This is a risk asset market that has benefited for a very long time from a highly accommodative Fed, both in terms  of of price and quantity when you think about the impact of the balance sheet.

• Keene – Let me start with Jeff Rosenberg here. Demand destruction to me is tangible. …. what does BlackRock say about demand destruction?
• Rosenberg – Well, it’s interesting because the last question in the press conference, the premise was, if you remember it, how high does due energy prices have to go before you’ll consider hiking rates? And that just misses this whole point about demand destruction, because the scenario where this goes on longer and is more disruptive to oil prices is a scenario where you shift the focus from inflation, which is today’s and the last couple of weeks story to a growth story. And it’s not how high the oil prices go before you hike, but how high and for how long do oil prices get before you cut prices? And I think that’s the that’s the swing. They’re the choice. And that’s exactly where I am, is that this is a GDP story of constricting GDP under massive price stress. 
• Rosenberg – It’s the market. The whole mass crisis is the complete inverse of that. So you’ve got a massive supply shock that requires much, much higher prices to rebalance the market. So to your point, the question is whether $100 in the paper market and futures right now, the futures curve going out to December, the price is something in the high seventies is sufficient enough to do that at the moment.
• Rosenberg – Well, that’s why what’s interesting about also what Tom is saying, if you look at the ACP, they’ve revised inflation up. Let’s just agree that makes total sense. But they also revised GDP up telling you that they’re not assuming any demand that book. So. Well, the textbook would certainly tell you that an oil price shock, stagflation, you get higher prices and lower GDP. And there was no evidence of that in the CPI today.
• Keene – Jeff, that’s a big question. I think it’s an important one. Where’s the hit to growth from the higher inflation, from the higher outlook for energy prices? 
• Rosenberg – The uncertainty in these forecasts is greater than the mean. And so that really tells you there’s not a huge amount of forecast accuracy here.

• “If we get into April, that’s what the betting markets say, the S&P is going to be below 6,000; we are going to go into a bear-market; … I don’t want to be alarmist but from this point onwards, if we don’t have a clear move towards an off-ramp, the S&P is going to go lower … ” 

 

What does a pure Technical Market Strategist say? John Koloves of Macro Risk Advisors said to CNBC’s Mike Santoli:

• “Bull markets look like Bull Markets & Bear Markets look like Bear Markets; this doesn’t necessarily look like a bull market & its starting to look more & more like a bear market;”
• “So its really a sequence of things – 
  • you have this initial decline lower coming close to support; probably going to get an exhaustive move at some point … may be around 6300 or 6100;
  • may be put in a sucker rally,
  • then put in that lower low; “
• “now we have too many stocks below their key moving averages – 50-day or 200-day; my models are giving me a sell signal; that tells me I can’t trust rallies any more;  Most stocks are in a bear market; rallies are very suspicious from hereon forward; “
• “this is a bad oversold condition; this is a contagion risk that is building … quickest way out is a proper capitulation move …”

 

Neal Dutta seems to concur in his one-liner at the start of the RenMac clip,

• ” I do believe that there is at some point the cost of NOT selling becomes greater than the cost of waiting to buy the dip“

Well, the below seems to share the above misgivings:

• Bespoke@bespokeinvest – Both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 closed below their 200-DMAs on Friday and also below their November lows. Downtrend confirmed. Read more of our thoughts at Bespoke Premium with our March Madness Special: https://bespokepremium.com/march-madness-special/

Are Sentiment Bottoms akin to market bottoms?

• Subu Trade@SubuTrade – 3-21 – S&P 500’s Daily Sentiment Index is at 22, the lowest since last April’s crash. Similar depressed sentiment readings came close to marking bottoms for $SPX

 

3. A unique set of circumstances?

We have seen two sets of problems attack the US economy in the past. The 1990 recession was energy based and the war in Iraq. That led to a market correction and a revival of both the markets and the US economy over the next 3 years. 2000 was driven by a bubble in the technology stocks. 2008 was again driven by the bubble in housing stocks, the enormous bubble in credit with a weakening economy. 

This crisis seems different and potentially more deadly with 3 or more simultaneous attacks on the US economy. Everybody was talking about the excesses in Private Credit just a week or two ago. That hasn’t gone away even though the fast rise in Treasury yields can only add pressure on that problem. Now we have an explosion in oil prices and energy costs on America and on the entire oil-consuming world including Western Europe, China, South-East Asia, the Indian Subcontinent AND the Persian Gulf – virtually the entire consuming world. At the same time, joblessness was already becoming a problem in America, potentially creating a recession in America while the need for defense spending to build up what has been spent in Ukraine & Iran is critical AND the obvious need to spend a large sum on developing strong anti-missile & anti-drone inventory.

And in the midst of this highly unusual 3-pronged crisis, the Fed showed that their sole focus is on their “credibility” in fighting both “inflation” and the President. What happened in the stock market in the morning & early afternoon on Thursday after Chair Powell’s presser on Wednesday was, in our opinion, the direct result of Chair Powell’s brushing aside of what Tom Keene referred to above as “demand destruction” in the US Economy. A bigger fall was prevented on Thursday afternoon by comments attributed to Prime Minister Netanyahu.

On the other hand, we do wonder whether the oil crisis has dulled the edge of the Private Credit mess & whether the Persian Gulf crisis cools down somewhat and if we see a “proper capitulation move” ahead in the short term. If so, then we could see a sharp rally ahead. After all, the only major sector up on Friday and for the week was Big Financials.

And speaking of oil, Carley Garner said on Bloomberg on March 16, that she sees oil down into the $30s later and even possibly in the $20s late in the year. If so, would that be after a 2008-like massive credit event & onset of a recession in the fall that leads to a massive injection of money – kinda a neo-TARP injection? 

Frankly, we have no clue. But what seems infinitely worse is that Chair Powell & his merry band of Feddies don’t have a clue either. 

 

4. Markets Last Week

4.1 US Indices:

• VIX down 2.2% to 26.78; Dow down 2.1%; SPX down 1.9%; RSP down 1.6%; NDX down  2%; SMH down 67 bps; RUT down 1.7%; MDY down 1.6%; XLU down  4.9%;

4.2 MAG 7:

• AAPL down 85 bps; AMZN down 1.1%; GOOGL down 42 bps; META down 3.3%; MSFT down 3.5%; NFLX down 3.7%; NVDA down 4.2%; MU down 76 bps;

4.3 Key Financials:

• BAC up 94 bps; C down 3.6%; GS up 4%; JPM up 1.1%; KRE down 11 bps; EUFN down 1.7%;  SCHW up 1.7%; APO up 7.2%; BX up 3.4%; KKR up 4.7%; XHB down 4.2%; ITB down 5.2%; NAIL down 15%;

4.4 – Dollar & Metals

Dollar was down 79 bps on UUP & down 1% on DXY:

• Gold down 10%; GDX down 14.1%; Silver down 15.1%; Copper down 7%; CLF down 7.6%;  FCX down 7.6%; MOS down 19.6%; Oil up 17 bps; Brent up 8.6%; OIH up 4.3%; XLE up 2.8%;

4.5 – International Stocks:

• EEM down 2%; FXI down 3%; KWEB down 6.4%; EWZ down 1.2%; EWY down 1.3%; EWG down 4.1%; INDA down 3.1%; INDY down 2.8%; EPI down 3.6%; SMIN down 3.4%;

4.6 Treasuries & Interest Rates:

• 30-year Treasury yield up 4 bps on the week; 20-yr yield up 9 bps; 10-yr up 10  bps; 7-yr up 12.7 bps; 5-yr up 13 bps; 3-yr up 15.4 bps; 2-yr up 15.8 bps; 1-yr up 16.9 bps;
• TLT down 82 bps; EDV down 91 bps; ZROZ down 42 bps; HYG down 35 bps; JNK down 28 bps;

 

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