Odds of rate hike this year very slim: Gartman

Odds of rate hike this year very slim: Gartman

With inflation still under the Federal Reserve 's 2 percent target and likely to stay that way through the rest of year, the odds of a rate hike this year are "very slim," widely followed investor Dennis Gartman said Thursday.

The central bank has indicated it wants to see improvement in the jobs market and signs of positive inflation before it begins normalizing.

Earlier in the day, the Commerce Department said second-quarter gross domestic product expanded at a 2.3 percent annual rate, slightly below economists' expectations. The Fed's preferred inflation gauge, the core PCE deflator, had a 1.8 percent quarter-to-quarter gain, but was still only up 1.3 percent year over year.

"We have a Fed that is by all accounts ... overtly dovish in its perspective. That number this morning gave them no reason, no reason at all to consider monetary tightening going into the next quarter," the editor and publisher of The Gartman Letter said in an interview with CNBC's " Closing Bell. "

"Unless suddenly you got commodity prices spiking to the upside, that PCE is going to remain under pressure and it's not going to get above 2 percent."

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Gartman noted that right now there are problems in commodity markets globally, with prices of grain, oil and metals all under pressure.

"They would like to raise rates," he said. "Everybody wants to see them raise rates but I think their propensity to do so, especially given this composition of the FOMC and the voting members, their propensity to tighten I think is very, very limited."

-Reuters contributed to this report.




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