Heading into the end of the year, questions remain around Treasury yields and the neutral interest rate.----- Transcript -----Seth Carpenter: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Seth Carpenter, Morgan Stanley's Chief Global Economist. Guneet Dhingra: And I'm Guneet Dhingra, Morgan Stanley's Head of U.S. Trade Strategies. Seth Carpenter: And today on the podcast, we'll be discussing our updated economic and rates outlook for the rest of the year and into 2024. It's Monday, September 11th, at 10 a.m. in New York. Seth Carpenter: All right, Guneet. We are now about a week into September and we can take stock of what we've learned over the summer. For macroeconomists like me we care about growth, inflation, monetary policy, and I'll say this summer spending indicators came in strong, inflation continued to fall, and we had Jackson Hole, the sort of nerd temple for monetary policy. And I have to say we didn't learn quite as much as I hoped, but we kind of know the Fed has done hiking, or at least very close. But I have to say, in your domain, the Treasury yield is trading roughly 4.25%. On the last day of June, when summer began, it was around 380. Can we just attribute the higher rate to thin liquidity and move on? Guneet Dhingra: You're right Seth, it's not just thin liquidity, but the conditions of August definitely played a meaningful part in sending yields higher. Typically, as investors look to go away for August, positive carry trades are the easiest trades to have on, and playing for higher yields has been positive carry. Which is why I think in August this year and even the last year, yields tended to go higher. But beyond August, seasonality, which might be the simplest explanation, investors have 4 major narratives out there that R-star, the so-called neutral rate of interest has increased, the end of yield curve control in Japan, more Treasury supply and more recently at the end of the summer, and increased supply of corporate debt. Guneet Dhingra: So before we go there Seth, you mentioned Jackson Hole at the end of the summer. The idea that some investors have that because the economy has held up so well, despite the Fed's rate hikes, that the underlying neutral rate or R-star must be higher and so will have higher interest rates not just now, but into the future. What is your take on this whole R* debate and what have you learned from Jackson Hole? Seth Carpenter: Absolutely. So I have to say Jackson Hole was very interesting, but this time there were a lot of very academic minded papers there that were very important to talk about. I can see how they can spur debate, but I'm not sure they provide that much that's actionable in the near term for the Fed or even for markets. And when it comes specifically to R-star, color me a bit skeptical and I say that for a few reasons. One, alternate explanations just abound. We could have got stronger spending because there's more residual impetus from the fiscal policy that's already in the pipeline. And in particular, if we look at where we missed our GDP forecast, a really big part of that was nonresidential structures investment. So that could go a long way to explain it. Second, if R-star really was higher, I think that would mean that the Fed would have to raise the peak rate during this hiking cycle even higher, not just rates off in the future. And so what does that mean? That means that I at least would have expected a parallel shift higher in rates, not just along in selling off. And in fact, you might even see a steeper inversion of the curve as the rate goes higher in the near term, but then has to come down later. So take all of that together, and I guess I'm just really not convinced that there's enough evidence to conclude that R-star is higher. Guneet Dhingra: Yeah, makes a lot of sense, Seth. And listening to you about the growth and economic picture, I'm even more convinced that this R-star story doesn't quite hold water. Seth Carpenter: All right, so then th