Doll On The Dollar, Oil, And The Fed

A stronger dollar and falling oil prices tend to help the economy, but right now those two factors aren’t helping stocks, Nuveen’s Bob Doll says.

Doll says the continued rise of the dollar and fall in oil prices are acting as headwinds on corporate earnings right now. “The hit to energy and related earnings from declining oil prices is nearly immediate,” he tells CNBC. “The benefit to everybody else, consumers in particular, is stretched out over time.” But Doll doesn’t think all of this is reason for the Federal Reserve to hold off on increasing interest rates this year. “We got to zero [rates] because of an emergency,” he said. “The emergency, in my judgment, is long passed. They need to get rates where they belong relative to the economy, which is low but not zero.”

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