At the end of a March 9-13 week whipsawed by the fog of war, DoubleLine Portfolio Manager Eric Dhall and Macro Asset Allocation Strategist Ryan Kimmel survey down but not (yet) correcting stocks, higher yields across the curve led by the front end on inflation jitters and energy surging amid rumor-fed price swings. In forex markets, they survey the dollar’s wartime dominance and the yen crushed on Japan and its neighbors’ vulnerability to the interruption liquified natural gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz.
Eric and Ryan cover the week’s macro prints, including the February CPI and January PCE Price Deflator, while cautioning against taking too much stock such rearview readings while the transience or permanence of the present energy shock remains a big unknown. Fed funds futures earlier in the week had priced in zero rate cuts for the remainder of 2026 before ending the week forecasting a single cut. Ryan fields a listener’s question on the revision-plagued nonfarm payrolls series.
Looking to the week ahead, macro prints such as the February PPI remain subject to the same potential obsolescence affecting previous releases. Topping Eric and Ryan’s radar screen will be the Federal Open Market Committee meeting and Jerome Powell news conference on Wednesday. “There’s naturally not going to be a cut,” Eric notes. “But there’s going to be a lot of parsing of the language to see the setup for the new Fed chair” after Powell’s term in that seat ends in May and Kevin Warsh presumably takes over as his Senate-confirmed successor.
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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. Kimmel joined DoubleLine in 2013. He is a Strategist on the Macro Asset Allocation team and Fixed Income Asset Allocation (FIAA) and Global Asset Allocation Committees. He also co-hosts DoubleLine’s weekly Minutes (Twitter @DLineMinutes, Minutes@Doubleline.com) podcast. Prior to DoubleLine, Mr. Kimmel was a Proprietary Trader at Gelber Group, trading currencies for the Foreign Currency Group. Prior to that, he was an Investment Banking Analyst in Morgan Stanley’s Mergers and Acquisitions Group. Mr. Kimmel holds a B.A. in Business Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and holds an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA.
