Finance

The world’s top hedge funds raked in record profits last year amid a resurgence in stock markets, new analysis showed.
The 20 leading fund managers made $67 billion in investor profits in 2023, up from the $65 billion recorded during the pandemic-era rally of 2021.
Overall, the fund management industry recorded gains of $218 billion after fees, according to estimates from LCH Investments .

Signage for Citadel Investment Group LLC hangs outside their office in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Bloomberg | Getty Images

The world’s top hedge funds raked in record profits last year amid a resurgence in stock markets, new analysis showed.
The 20 leading fund managers made $67 billion in investor profits in 2023, up from the $65 billion recorded during the pandemic-era rally of 2021, according research Monday from LCH Investments, a fund of hedge funds.

Overall, the fund management industry recorded gains of $218 billion after fees, according to LCH Investments estimates.
The top funds — identified as those which have performed best in dollar terms since their inception — accounted for around one-third of annual profits last year, despite managing less than a fifth (19%) of the industry’s assets.
Included among the best performers were Christopher Hohn’s TCI, Ken Griffin’s Citadel and Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking.

Top 20 managers by 2023 profits

Firm
Assets (billion)
Net profits since inception (billion)
2023 profits (billion)
Launch year

TCI
$50
$41.3
$12.9
2004

Citadel
$56.8
$74
$8.1
1990

Viking
$30.5
$40.9
$6
1999

Millennium
$61.9
$56.1
$5.7
1989

Elliott
$62.2
$47.6
$5.5
1977

DE Shaw
$43.8
$56.1
$4.2
1988

Lone Pine
$15.9
$35.6
$4.2
1996

Baupost
$27.4
$37
$3.8
1983

Pershing Square
$17.9
$18.8
$3.5
2004

SAC/Point72
$31
$33
$3
1992

Appaloosa
$17
$35
$2.7
1993

Farallon
$40.4
$35.7
$2.6
1987

Och Ziff/Sculptor
$28.7
$32.2
$2.3
1994

Egerton
$14
$23.9
$2.3
1995

David Kempner
$37
$21
$1.8
1983

King Street
$9.5
$19.5
$0.9
1995

Brevan Howard
$35.6
$28.5
$0.4
2003

Caxton
$13.4
$19.5
$-0.3
1983

Bridgewater
$72.5
$55.8
$-2.6
1975

Soros
N/A
$43.9
N/A
1973

Source: LCH Investments

LCH Investments’ director and head of research, Brad Amiee, said that the leading funds were buoyed by the stock market’s “fantastic run” in 2023. However, he added that many also showcased especially savvy stock selection strategies.
“You could argue that, since shorting is such a challenging sub-strategy, keeping things long-biased and having a concentrated portfolio of high quality positions has been the way to go,” Amiee told the Financial Times.

TCI, the top ranking fund, recorded investor profits of $12.9 billion and ended last year up 33%, beating the S&P 500’s 24% gain.
Included in its largest holders were Alphabet, Canadian National Railway, Visa and General Electric.
Citadel, which ranked second in 2023, made $8.1 billion in profits after bringing in a record-breaking $16 billion in 2022. Its $74 billion in gains since inception rank it as the most successful hedge fund in history.
The research also found that the top 20 funds have made a combined $755.4 billion in profits since inception, well above the $655.5 billion in total managed assets.
A hedge fund is a limited partnership of private investors whose money is managed by fund managers. Hedge funds are typically known for investing in higher risk and more non-traditional assets compared to mutual funds. More

A report released Monday by the Fed’s Office of Inspector General takes issue with trades made by former regional presidents Robert Kaplan of Dallas and Eric Rosengren of Boston.
The report concludes that their actions resulted in conflicts of interest that raised issues over impartiality and the proper conduct of central bank officials.

The Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve building during a renovation in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2023.
Valerie Plesch | Bloomberg | Getty Images

A watchdog review into market trading from two former high-ranking Federal Reserve officials criticizes their actions but does not accuse either of doing anything illegal.
The report released Monday by the Fed’s Office of Inspector General takes issue with trades made by former regional presidents Robert Kaplan of Dallas and Eric Rosengren of Boston.

Both men left their posts in September 2021 — Kaplan to early retirement and Rosengren for medical reasons — amid criticism over trading that ultimately saw Fed Chair Jerome Powell and Governor Richard Clarida come under question along with Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic.
Revelations showed that some Fed officials engaged in market trading at a time when they also were considering important and delicate policy matters in the early days of the Covid pandemic in 2020. The Fed ultimately slashed interest rates and launched a bevy of lending and liquidity programs that helped prop up financial markets as the pandemic crushed the U.S. economy.
While Clarida is mentioned in the OIG report, the details focus on Kaplan and Rosengren’s actions. The report concludes that their actions resulted in conflicts of interest that raised issues over impartiality and the proper conduct of central bank officials.
CNBC has reached out to both former officials for comment. Kaplan, who traded millions in stocks and options and other securities, has said that his actions were in compliance with standards in place at the time.
With regard to Rosengren, the report faults him for not disclosing multiple trades on his 2020 ethics forms. Moreover, the report noted “multiple discrepancies” in brokerage statements and trading data.

Trades he made regarding real estate investment trusts at a time when the Fed was buying mortgage-backed securities “create an ‘appearance of a conflict of interest’ that could cause a reasonable person to question Mr. Rosengren’s impartiality under FRB Boston’s code of conduct,” the report said.
On Kaplan, the report states that the OIG “did not find that his trading activities violated laws, rules, regulations, or policies related to trading activities as investigated by our office.”
However, the OIG faults Kaplan for not disclosing specific information regarding the selling of stock option contracts.
“This lack of information, in our opinion, did not support public confidence in the impartiality and integrity of the policymakers and senior staff carrying out the public mission of the [Federal Open Market Committee’s] work, especially during this critical time period when the Federal Reserve was taking monetary policy actions to address the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the U.S. economy,” the report stated.
There is a notation that Kaplan and the Dallas Fed were not specific in the disclosures because they “determined that this approach was permissible because it was consistent with Chair Powell’s reporting” on his disclosure forms.
Since the controversy, the Fed has revamped its trading rules and now prohibits officials from owning stocks, bonds and cryptocurrencies.
The new rules “aim to support public confidence in the impartiality and integrity of the Committee’s work by guarding against even the appearance of any conflict of interest,” said a statement issued when the Fed made the changes in February 2022. More

Every day brings more misery for China’s foreign investors. Some are most worried by China’s souring relations with Western governments. Others fret about the unprecedented slump in the country’s property market. Many are simply tired of losing money. On January 22nd the CSI 300 index of Chinese shares dropped by 1.6%; it is now nearly a quarter below its level of a year ago. Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index fell by 2.3% on the day, and is more than a third below its level at the start of 2023.Heady optimism about China Inc. is an increasingly distant memory. Just five years ago investors clamoured for exposure to the country’s growth miracle and sought diversification from rich-world markets, which often move in lockstep. Providers of the world’s most important stock indices—FTSE and MSCI—were making adjustments accordingly. Between 2018 and 2020 Chinese stocks listed onshore, known as A-shares, were added to the benchmark emerging-markets index.image: The EconomistAt their peak in 2020 Chinese firms made up over 40% of the index by value. In 2022 foreigners owned $1.2trn-worth of stocks, or 5-10% of the total, in mainland China and Hong Kong. One investment manager describes the challenge of investing in emerging markets while avoiding China as like investing in developed markets while avoiding America. So how will investors do it? And where will their money flow instead?Some investment firms are eager to help. Jupiter Asset Management, Putnam Investments and Vontobel all launched actively managed “ex-China” funds in 2023. An emerging-market, ex-China, exchange-traded fund (etf) issued by BlackRock is now the fifth-largest emerging-market equity etf, with $8.7bn in assets under management, up from $5.7bn in July.A handful of large emerging stockmarkets are benefiting. Money has poured into India, South Korea and Taiwan, whose shares together make up more than 60% of ex-China emerging-market stocks. These markets received around $16bn in the final three months of 2023. Squint and the countries together look something like China: a fast-growing middle-income country with potential for huge consumption growth (India) and two that are home to advanced Asian industry (Taiwan and South Korea).image: The EconomistWestern investors looking for exposure to China’s industrial stocks are also turning to Japan, encouraged by its corporate-governance reforms. Last year foreign investors ploughed ¥3trn ($20bn) into Japanese equity funds, the most in a decade. For those with broad mandates, different asset classes are an option. Asia-focused funds investing in real assets, including infrastructure, have grown in popularity.Yet these various alternatives have flaws of their own. Unlike China’s cheap offerings, Indian stocks are expensive. They have higher price-to-earnings ratios than those in other big emerging markets. Although Japan’s stocks look relatively cheap, they make an odd choice for investors seeking rapid income growth. Likewise, Taiwanese and South Korean stocks are included among emerging markets because of the liquidity and accessibility of their exchanges, but both economies are mature high-income ones.Size is a problem, too. Many of the places benefiting as supply chains move away from China are home to puny public markets. Even after fast growth, India’s total market capitalisation runs to just $4trn—not even a third of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Shenzhen combined. When MSCI released its emerging-market index in 1988, Malaysia accounted for a third of its stocks by value. The country now represents less than 2%. Brazil, Chile and Mexico together made up another third; today they make up less than 10%.And whereas returns on Chinese investments tend to follow their own logic, smaller economies are more exposed to the vagaries of the dollar and American interest rates. According to research by UBS Asset Management, Chinese stocks had a correlation of 0.56 with those in the rich world between December 2008 and July 2023 (a score of one suggests the stocks rise and fall in tandem; zero suggests no correlation). By contrast, stocks from emerging markets excluding China had a correlation of 0.84 with rich-world equities.The emergence and growth of funds that pledge to cut out China will make life easier for investors who wish to avoid the world’s second-largest stockmarket. Without a turnaround in the country’s economic fortunes, or a sustained cooling of tensions between Beijing and Washington, interest in such strategies will grow. They will not, however, evoke the sort of enthusiasm investors once felt about China. ■ More

The consumer price index, a key inflation measure, has declined from a pandemic-era peak of 9.1% to 3.4% in December.
Reaching the Federal Reserve’s 2% annual target may be harder than what came before, some economists believe.
Largely, that’s because it may take a while for housing inflation to cool and for wage growth to moderate, they said.

A man walks past a barbershop in Los Angeles.
Robyn Beck | Afp | Getty Images

Inflation in the U.S. economy is on the retreat. But the road to ultimate victory may be harder than what’s come already, some economists argue.
“The so-called last mile is going to get a lot trickier,” Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic advisor at Allianz and president of Queens’ College at the University of Cambridge, recently told CNBC.

“We’re not going to have the tailwinds that we had, and we’re going to have some headwinds,” he said.
Inflation measures how fast prices are rising for goods and services — anything from concert tickets and haircuts to groceries and furniture. Policymakers aim for a roughly 2% annual inflation target.

Arrows pointing outwards

The consumer price index — a key inflation barometer — has fallen gradually from a 9.1% pandemic-era peak in June 2022 to 3.4% in December 2023, within striking distance of the target.
This final disinflationary hurdle will be a challenge without curtailing economic growth and risking recession, a dynamic that would likely crimp consumer demand and rein in prices, economists said.
“One theme is clear — the transition from 8-4% inflation is easier than the transition from 4-2% inflation,” Gargi Chaudhuri, head of iShares investment strategy for the Americas at BlackRock, wrote about the recent CPI report.

Why goods won’t be much help

This difficulty with reducing inflation is largely centered on the “services” side of the economy, according to economists. Think of services as things we can experience, such as rent, auto repairs, haircuts, veterinary visits, theater tickets and medical care.
Goods, on the other hand, are tangible things such as cars and clothes. They account for 21% of the consumer price index (after stripping out items in the food and energy categories).
More from Personal Finance:Why egg prices are on the rise againA 12% retirement return assumption is ‘absolutely nuts’Here’s where prices fell in December 2023, in one chart
Inflation among these so-called “core” goods peaked more than 12% in 2022 but is now near zero as supply chains have normalized.
That means further broad disinflation likely won’t come from consumer goods, economists said. In fact, attacks by Houthi rebels on ships in the Red Sea threaten to disrupt a key transit corridor and may trigger higher goods inflation if it persists, El-Erian explained.

Where inflation has been ‘sticky’

Inflation among services has been more stubborn, though. And consumers spend more on services, which account for 59% of the CPI (after stripping out energy services).
While down from more than 7% last year, services inflation still sits at 5.3%. A big reason for that persistence is housing, which accounts for more than a third of the overall CPI.
“The shelter inflation component is the part that has remained quite sticky,” Chaudhuri said in an interview.
Economists expect shelter inflation to moderate. It’s just a matter of when and how quickly it happens.

For example, prices for newly signed leases appear to have deflated: The New Tenant Rent Index declined to about -5% in Q4 2023, a significant drop from +3% in Q3, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data issued last week.
It takes a while for such data to feed through into the Labor Department’s CPI calculations, economists said.
“I think it’ll take most of the year to get back to target” on inflation, largely because of shelter, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.
Labor-market dynamics are also an important component of “services,” economists said.
A hot job market has meant strong wage growth for workers. That dynamic can underpin inflation if businesses raise prices quickly to compensate for higher labor costs and if larger paychecks lead to more spending by consumers.

The so-called last mile is going to get a lot trickier.

Mohamed El-Erian
chief economic advisor at Allianz and president of Queens’ College at the University of Cambridge

Wage growth needs to be about 3.5% a year, on average, to achieve target inflation, Chaudhuri said. But hourly earnings growth is currently about 4.1% for private-sector workers, for example.
Further, businesses have learned they can raise prices and consumers will keep spending (so far, at least). That doesn’t give businesses much incentive to pump the brakes, said Sarah House, senior economist at Wells Fargo Economics.
“I think the taboo of not raising prices on consumers for fear of losing their business was broken in the pandemic,” House said.
Absent weaker consumer demand — and weaker economic growth — it may be hard to unwind business owners’ mindset, she said.

Why this may all be ‘nonsense’

Not all economists think the last mile of disinflation will be harder than what came before, however.
Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics, called the theory “nonsense” in a recent research note, for example.

Largely, that’s because, by one measure, the inflation battle is already nearly won, he said. The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge is the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index; in November, the PCE index was running at a 1.9% six-month annualized rate, “which means it was already below target,” Ashworth said.
“All the Fed needs to see is that slower pace of price increases being sustained for a little longer,” he wrote. More

The former president, and overwhelming favorite to secure the Republican nomination for the 2024 race, plans to impose a 10% tariff on all imported goods.
The center-right American Action Forum think tank said the plan would “distort global trade, discourage economic activity, and have broad negative consequences for the U.S. economy.”
Rabobank’s Michael Every said the plan was aimed at “structurally breaking the global system by hook or by crook, to basically reindustrialize the U.S. in a neo-Hamiltonian manner.”

Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a rally in advance of the New Hampshire presidential primary election in Rochester, New Hampshire, U.S., January 21, 2024. 
Mike Segar | Reuters

Markets need to begin thinking about the structural impact of Donald Trump’s proposed 10% tariff increase, which “shakes up every asset class,” according to Michael Every, global strategist at Rabobank.
The former president, and overwhelming favorite to secure the Republican nomination for the 2024 race, plans to impose a 10% tariff on all imported goods, trebling the government’s intake and aiming to incentivize American domestic production.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said earlier this month that the plan would “raise the cost of a wide variety of goods that American businesses and consumers rely on,” though she noted that tariffs are appropriate “in some cases.”
Criticism of the policy has been relatively bipartisan. The Tax Foundation think tank highlights that such a tariff would effectively raise taxes on U.S. consumers by more than $300 billion a year, along with triggering retaliatory tax increases by international trade partners on U.S. exports.
The center-right American Action Forum estimated, based on the assumption that trading partners would retaliate, that the policy would result in a 0.31% ($62 billion) decrease to U.S. GDP, making consumers worse off and decreasing U.S. welfare by $123.3 billion.

After Republican rival Ron DeSantis ended his bid for the GOP nomination, Every told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” on Monday that markets were “not going to be caught napping” by a potential Trump presidency, as they were in 2016. He suggested one of investors’ top concerns would be the 10% tariff on all U.S. imports.
“First of all, they can’t model that because they don’t really understand what the second and third order effects are, and more importantly, they don’t grasp that Trump isn’t talking about a 10% tariff just because it’s a 10% tariff,” Every said.

“He’s talking about structurally breaking the global system by hook or by crook to basically reindustrialize the U.S. in a neo-Hamiltonian manner which is how the U.S. originally industrialized, putting up a barrier between it and the rest of the world so it’s cheap to produce in America and more expensive to produce everywhere else if you’re importing into America.”
A second Trump term
Every added that a return to this type of trade policy “shakes up every asset class — equities, FX, bonds, you name it — everything gets put in a box and shaken around, so that’s what markets should start thinking about.”
In the American Action Forum’s November report, data and policy analyst Tom Lee concluded that in the most likely scenario that trading partners impose retaliatory tariffs, a new 10% duty on all goods imported to the U.S. would “distort global trade, discourage economic activity, and have broad negative consequences for the U.S. economy.”

Read more CNBC politics coverage

Trump floated the 10% tariff during an interview last year with Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow, his former White House economic advisor, saying “it’s a massive amount of money.”
“It’s not going to stop business because it’s not that much,” he claimed, “but it’s enough that we really make a lot of money.”
During his first term in office, Trump triggered a trade war with China by unilaterally slapping $250 billion worth of tariffs on goods imported from China, which the AAF estimated have cost Americans an extra $195 billion since 2018.
China responded with its own tariffs on U.S. goods, and Trump also imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from most countries, including many of Washington’s biggest allies.

Keen to maintain a firm stance on Beijing, President Joe Biden’s administration has largely kept these tariffs in place, though converted some of the metal tariffs into tariff-rate quotas, which allow a lower tariff rate on particular product imports within a specified quantity.
Dan Boardman-Weston, CEO of BRI Wealth Management, said the macroeconomic and geopolitical landscape is now very different and more challenging than when Trump’s first term began in 2017, and added that his erratic approach to policy decisions would add to the kind of uncertainty that markets most dislike.
“In 2017, markets really appreciated the Trump presidency because of all the tax cuts and deregulation, and there was a more conducive market environment I think back then, with where rates were, for markets to move higher,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Monday.
“I think this time is going to be very different, and I do think the geopolitical risks across the world are rising, and this doesn’t seem to be on investors’ radars as of yet.”
He noted Trump’s tendency to “change his mind” so frequently on geopolitical issues that “people won’t know where his thinking is at.”

Trump has claimed that he would stop Ukraine’s war with Russia within 24 hours, but has been economical with details of his supposed peace plan, and throughout his political career has lavished praise on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He was also impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives for allegedly threatening to withhold U.S. military aid to Ukraine unless President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sanctioned a politically motivated investigation into his then-leading electoral challenger Biden. Trump was acquitted by the Senate.
“That unpredictable approach to how he will approach the war in Ukraine or how he will approach relations with China and Taiwan I think lead to heightened risks from a geopolitical perspective, which I think will impact into market valuations,” Boardman-Weston said.
“It’s that added element of uncertainty in an already very uncertain world.” More

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The Utah Jazz is casting its net wide for international players. 
“We have scouts all over the world — almost every basketball country throughout the world,” Danny Ainge, the team’s CEO and governor, told CNBC’s “Halftime Report” on Friday.

The two-time champion of the National Basketball Association and former NBA All-Star highlighted having scouts in countries throughout South America, Europe and Asia, as well as every region in the U.S.
“It’s a worldwide sport, and we got to find them all,” he said.
His remarks come after the NBA announced in October that a record 125 international players — five of which were on the Utah Jazz — were on opening-night rosters for the 2023-24 season. Those players hailed from 40 countries and territories across six continents, with a record from Canada at 26 and France at 14.
All 30 NBA teams feature at least one international player this season.
International ticket sales also saw a 120% increase from last season, according to StubHub. Fans are traveling from a total of 92 countries to North American games, which is up from 68 countries last season.

Ainge joined the Utah Jazz as CEO in December 2021 after leading basketball operations for the Boston Celtics for 18 years.
Utah Jazz’s valuation currently sits at $3.09 billion, according to data from research firm Statista. This marks a 52.59% increase from last year and a 76.57% increase since the year Ainge joined the franchise.

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Exchange-traded fund experts anticipate spot bitcoin ETFs, which debuted this month, to spark a new wave of crypto products.
Cboe Global Markets’ Catherine Clay believes options are a natural progression for bitcoin ETFs.

“We believe that the utility of the options, what they provide to the end investor in terms of downside hedging, risk-defined exposures into bitcoin, really would help the end investor and the ecosystem,” the firm’s global head of derivatives told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week.
The Cboe, the largest U.S. options exchange, filed with the SEC on Jan. 5 to offer options linked to bitcoin exchange-traded products. It expects those options to begin trading later this year, per its news release.
According to Dave Nadig, financial futurist at VettaFi, options on the crypto funds could appeal to institutional investors, who have been more reluctant to invest in the digital asset class.
“You’re going to start seeing all sorts of hedge fund players in the space,” he said in the same interview. “Folks who might not have been traditionally speculating on crypto directly in the crypto ecosystem are now going to have something to play with.”
Nadig also suggested that zero-day options — contracts that expire the same day they’re traded, commonly known as “0DTEs” — would be the ultimate goal for bitcoin derivatives products.

“If what happens in bitcoin is what’s happened in single stocks, we’re going to see retail in particular and a lot of institutions move towards zero days to expiration options trading on bitcoin itself,” he said.
Still, Cboe’s Clay cautioned that those products could be very far away.
“We still have not even received approval to list options, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves and think about 0DTEs,” she said. “We want to get options on these ETFs in a very intelligent and thoughtful way that actually … really builds the ecosystem of new entrants into the market.”
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Morgan Stanley’s new CEO, Ted Pick, on Thursday expressed confidence his bank will hit financial targets of $10 trillion in client assets and a 20% return.
Pick, a three-decade Morgan Stanley veteran who took over this month, said he has three priorities: sticking to the strategy laid out by predecessor James Gorman, maintaining the bank’s culture and achieving their targets.

Morgan Stanley’s new CEO, Ted Pick, on Thursday expressed confidence his bank will hit financial targets of $10 trillion in client assets and a 20% return.
Pick, a three-decade Morgan Stanley veteran who took over this month, said he has three priorities: sticking to the strategy laid out by predecessor James Gorman, maintaining the bank’s culture and achieving their targets.

“Ten trillion in wealth and asset management dollars, that’s going to be coming,” Pick said in a CNBC interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We’re going to get there and hit 20% returns. That’s it: 10 and 20. It will take some time, but I’m super bullish.”
Pick’s predecessor guided Morgan Stanley in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis that nearly capsized the investment bank. Gorman transformed the firm into a wealth management giant through a series of savvy acquisitions, while helping rehabilitate trading businesses for a new era on Wall Street.
The pivot to wealth management boosted Morgan Stanley’s valuation well beyond rivals including Goldman Sachs, but more recently concerns about growth in that business have stymied the stock. Shares of the bank are down 12% in the last year.
“Part of the reason the boss had so much success is he kind of guided the place to a durable narrative instead of the herky-jerky, unpredictable Morgan Stanley,” Pick said.
The firm’s “secret sauce” is in the combination of a leading investment bank with its wealth management operations, he added.

“The name of the game is to sort of balance realistic expectations and build credibility, but have people understanding that we are highly confident of both of these pieces to grow,” Pick said. “The ecosystem of being a leading wealth manager, banking individuals not institutions, and then also covering them as an investment bank or hedging the risk as a trading house, that is unique.”
What may help matters this year is an expected rebound in corporate mergers and related activities after more than a year of depressed volumes, Pick said. A backlog of deals has been building since before the Covid pandemic began in 2020, he said.
“There’s a ton of activity buzz,” Pick said. “I think once people start getting going, we’re going to see a bunch of it.”
The U.S. economy is “probably past peak inflation,” and it’s “not inconceivable” that the Federal Reserve will be forced to cut rates faster than anticipated because of weakening data, Pick added.
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