DoubleLine Portfolio Manager Eric Dhall and Analyst Mark Kimbrough cover the week ended March 21 in stocks (0:33) and fixed income (3:04), then turn to a macro picture (5:41) characterized by “kind of bearish” retail sales, fast-growing manufacturing, recessionary warnings from the “broken clock” that has been the Leading Economic Index and an uncertain Fed.
With the futures market pricing in three cuts to the fed funds rate (15:01) in 2025, Eric Dhall cautions against that expectation. Fed officials, he says, seem “befuddled,” with Fed Chair Jerome Powell at his March 19 news conference repeatedly invoking the “uncertainty” of current economic landscape. Mr. Dhall notes a decline in the doves in the FOMC’s dot plot even as FOMC members were expecting economic growth to slow. Mark Kimbrough agrees, saying, “Uncertainty makes sense. Uncertainty, is the new buzzword” at the Fed. “They’re trying to look through the impacts of these tariffs, but they don’t know.”
Looking ahead to the March 24-28 week (19:00), Eric and Mark will be on the lookout for S&P Global PMI readings, S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller house price indexes, Conference Board consumer confidence and the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, Personal Consumption Expenditures.
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Mr. Dhall joined DoubleLine in 2013. He is a Portfolio Manager on the Macro-Asset Allocation team where he works with portfolio management performing analysis and trading for derivatives-based and multi-asset strategies. Mr. Dhall’s research and analysis has contributed to the team’s development of DoubleLine’s smart-beta suite of strategies. Prior to DoubleLine, he worked at Capital Group performing quantitative analysis in fixed income. Prior to Capital Group, Mr. Dhall was an instructor in finance at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and a research instructor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. Previous to that, he worked in International Finance at Gulf Machinery Company. Mr. Dhall holds a B.S. in Physics with a secondary emphasis in Business from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.S. in Financial Engineering from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
Mr. Kimbrough joined DoubleLine in 2012, where he worked primarily on Agency Mortgage Backed Securities and the Fixed Income Asset Allocation process as a member of the Risk Analyst team. He transitioned to his current role in 2019 where he serves as an Analyst on the Macro Asset Allocation team. Prior to DoubleLine, Mr. Kimbrough was at Western Asset Management working on systems monitoring and development within the Risk Department. He holds a BS in Business Administration with a concentration in Real Estate Finance and a minor in Economics from the University of Southern California. Mr. Kimbrough is a CFA® charterholder.
