Quantifying Fed Sentiment

Apollo Chief Economist

The Bloomberg natural language processing model analyzes Fed speeches and currently shows FOMC members moving toward a tightening bias, see chart below.

Note how the model never predicted rate cuts in 2024. Instead, Fed sentiment has simply been less hawkish in 2024 than in 2022 and 2023.

The bottom line is that this Fed sentiment model using data back to 2009 shows that Fed communication continues to favor Fed hikes rather than Fed cuts.

The Bloomberg natural language Fedspeak model shows Fedspeak turning more hawkish recently
Source: Bloomberg, Apollo Chief Economist. Note: Fedspeak: NLP model of Fed sentiment. The index is underpinned by an NLP algorithm trained on Bloomberg News headlines, covering about 6,200 speaking engagements by Fed officials since 2009. A reading below zero implies rate cuts, while above zero indicates a tightening basis.

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