Oil up as Fed’s Bostic hints at another hold on rates and likely 2024 cut
Investing.com — If there’s nothing greatly new in your own market to prop it up, you can always borrow a fundamental or two that weakens your rivals — in this case, US Treasuries and the dollar.
Oil prices rose for the first time in three sessions on Tuesday after senior Federal Reserve policy maker Raphael Bostic said the central bank was in no rush to pile rate hikes on Americans to get inflation back under control — though he said a restrictive monetary policy will be necessary to keep spending and jobs growth from getting out of whack with the rest of the economy.
What’s more, Bostic, who’s the Atlanta Fed’s president, threw another bone at risk markets getting clobbered by the surge in Treasury yields that came on the back of the selloff in US bonds and the accompanying spike in the dollar to 11-month highs. He suggested there might even be a rate hike by the end of 2024.
His words were more than a solace for longs in commodities and equities, desperate for a break from the fear factor of a super hawkish Fed that has gripped the investing world again after a respite in the second quarter. Coming ahead of a widely expected rate hike in either November or December — and after September’s pause — it was a sign the central bank might be done with newer rate hikes, after its 11 increases between March 2022 and July 2023.
Bostic also helped offset an utterly bearish mood that gripped markets shortly after the Labor Department reported earlier on Tuesday that the number of job openings in the United States rose more than expected in August, chipping away at some of the confidence the Fed may have had in its fight against inflation.
An estimated 9.61 million jobs opened up in August, according to the Labor Department's
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