Lacy Hunt: Federal Reserve has engaged in stealth easing since December

Lacy Hunt has spent decades as one of Wall Street’s most committed deflationists. So when the chief economist at Hoisington Investment Management starts warning about inflation, the fixed-income world tends to pay attention. Hunt’s argument is straightforward: the Federal Reserve has been buying roughly $290 billion in Treasury securities from mid-December 2025 through June 30, 2026. That, he contends, amounts to stealth quantitative easing, a quiet injection of liquidity into the financial system even as the Fed’s public posture has remained restrictive. The money supply evidence The core of Hunt’s case rests on what’s happening to other deposit liabilities, or ODL, a measure of money supply that captures the deposits sitting in the banking system. During the first half of 2026, ODL growth surged to an annualized rate of 8.9%. For context, the 10-year compounded growth rate had been running at 5.7%. The lending data reinforces the story. Commercial and industrial loan growth hit an annualized rate of 14.0% during the same period, a dramatic leap from a prior trend of 3.3%. Inflation itself has cooperated with Hunt’s thesis, at least directionally. A reacceleration began in Februar...