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00:00 Speaker A
J Powell fielded a lot of questions. There were some questions he didn’t want to get into. I mean you you heard him, he wasn’t about to get into politics, a wise move. Uh, uh the dollar though, he didn’t want to he didn’t take the bait on the dollar either. He said, listen, we do we do monetary policy here, but I am curious to get your thoughts on dollar weakness, what’s driving it, you know, what does it mean for investors, Patrick?
00:24 Patrick
Well, what’s driving it? I think you go all the way back to 2022. You have the weaponization of the dollar during the the Russian invasion of Ukraine and clearly, um uh people outside the United States have to question, you know, their access to their reserves, you know, is the US a a good partner? Do I want to have uh access assets in what appears to be uh an administration that does at least condone a weak dollar is okay with a weaker dollar. So I think it’s definitely something that that captured everyone’s attention last year as it helped drive out performance on the international side.
00:58 Patrick
But to us, you know, we’re certainly going to see bouts of dollar strength, um especially if the Federal Reserve would have to, you know, have go on to an extended pause or if inflation were to, you know, turn around later this year and and the Fed may actually have to entertain a hike, which is obviously an outside the box thing to say. Um that could increase the dollar. But right now, um we’re positioning uh portfolios to take advantage of dollar weakness. Um it’s gone pretty far, pretty fast. We saw this last week took another leg down over the same type of geopolitical concerns and obviously what was going on with uh the markets in Japan. So, um, to us, again, dollar should be a tail one for for kind of investing overseas and looking for other kind of weak dollar dollar plays and we’ve been taking advantage of that in our portfolios.