(Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s debut address to the Wyoming gathering of central bankers this week will do little to shake financial markets if history is any guide.
That’s according to analysts at Cornerstone Macro LLC, who reviewed the reaction of investors to past gatherings in Jackson Hole.
“The reality is that from a market perspective, recent Jackson Hole symposia have been fairly boring,” analysts at Cornerstone led by Roberto Perli, a former Fed economist, said in a report published on Wednesday.
Neither the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index nor the ten-year Treasury yield moved much in the aftermath of speeches by Fed Chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, they found. The exception was 2011, when Bernanke fleshed out plans to reinvest maturing bonds into longer-dated debt in a plan known as Operation Twist.
The Cornerstone analysis concluded the limited fallout related to Bernanke and Yellen preferring to use the central bank’s policy meetings rather than the Grand Teton National Park as the place to communicate major decisions. Yellen skipped 2015’s symposium, which is organized by the Kansas City Fed.
An improvement in Fed communications over recent decades also meant chairs had less need to correct market expectations, Perli’s team said in the report.
Looking at this week, Cornerstone said Powell hasn’t shown any tendency to deviate from the collegial approach to setting policy and that there doesn’t seem to be a need for him to adjust market expectations.
“The symposium will very likely generate interesting ideas and spur a lively debate among academics and policy makers, but as a base case shouldn’t result in any deviation from the policy trajectory the market already priced in,” Perli and colleagues said.
Minutes of the Fed’s July 31-Aug. 1 meeting, which were published on Wednesday, left little doubt that Powell plans to raise the U.S. benchmark lending rate next month.
At Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS), Hans Redeker, global head of foreign exchange strategy, is advising clients to still pay close attention. In a report to clients released on Thursday, he estimated that the S&P 500 rallied nine out of twelve times for an average gain of 0.6 percent from the past 12 meetings and that 10-year Treasuries rose more than two-year notes on nine occasions.
“Investors should be attentive to Jackson Hole,” said Redeker. “Investors will be looking for signals to gauge whether Powell will use this as an opportunity to convey potential policy.”