Thursday’s cut the start of a “long journey”

“I was actually expecting a bigger cut than 100 bps,” Lighthouse Research Founder and Chief Economist Jean-Paul Pigat told Bloomberg TV. “That seems like a lot in the context of emerging markets, but remember … rates were raised 700 bps from the time of the devaluation up until last week … this is the first step of a very long journey to go,” he added. Pigat says the cut is encouraging, but it is still “half the surprise hike we saw in July 2017…after everyone thought the rate tightening cycle was over…We’ve got a long time to go before we’re anywhere near normalization in monetary policy.”