Pimco’s Kashkari Says Fed Likely to Ease Further With QE3

Pacific Investment Management Co.’s Neel Kashkari said the Federal Reserve is likely to start a third round of quantitative easing as BlackRock Inc. (BLK)’s Robert Doll said the central bank will wait to see whether the economy weakens more.

“The economy is slowing,” Kashkari, who heads global equities at Newport Beach, California-based Pimco, said today at the Bloomberg Asset Management Summit in Boston. Worsening unemployment, lower equity prices and the risk of shocks coming out of the euro region suggest the Fed will act, he said.

U.S. stocks rose today and the dollar weakened as reports on inflation and jobless claims fueled speculation that the Fed will discuss stimulus efforts at its meeting next week. Jobless claims unexpectedly climbed by 6,000 to 386,000 in the week ended June 9, the Labor Department said today. The U.S. economy expanded at a 1.9 percent annual rate in the first quarter, the Commerce Department reported May 31, down from its prior estimate of 2.2 percent.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose 0.9 percent to 1326.07 at 11:40 am in New York. The dollar weakened against 15 of 16 major peers.

Doll, who plans to retire as BlackRock’s chief equity strategist, said regulators would have to see significantly weaker economic growth or a “bust in the euro” before they act to stimulate the economy with another round of bond purchases.

“QE3 is for an emergency,” Doll said today. “The Fed wants us to know there is an insurance policy if we need it,” he said.

Fed Stimulus

The U.S. financial crisis four years ago spurred the Fed to revive the economy by purchasing $2.3 trillion of bonds from December 2008 to June 2011 in two rounds of a tactic called quantitative easing. The Fed is scheduled to buy as much as $2.25 billion of Treasuries today due from February 2036 to May 2042 as part of Operation Twist, a program to replace $400 billion of shorter-term securities in its holdings with longer- term bonds through this month to keep borrowing costs down.

The crisis in Europe will weigh on U.S. policy makers’ decision to further stimulate the economy, Kashkari said. It will take “years, not months” to solve as Greece exits from the euro region, Kashkari said.

Greece’s exit may not necessarily happen next week, after the country’s elections, and the outcome for markets will greatly depend on how orderly the process is, according to Kashkari.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alexis Leondis in New York at aleondis@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Christian Baumgaertel at cbaumgaertel@bloomberg.net

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PIMCO Managing Director Neel Kashkari

John Zich/Bloomberg

Neel Kashkari, managing director of Pacific Investment Management Co. (Pimco).

Neel Kashkari, managing director of Pacific Investment Management Co. (Pimco). Photographer: John Zich/Bloomberg