After today’s rate cut, is the Fed ready to pause?   Chair Powell and the FOMC had their final meeting of the year today and announced a 0.25 percentage point cut to the overnight borrowing rate. In addition to the rate announcement, Chair Powell provided guidance to the Fed’s interest rate path moving forward. He...Read More

Fed’s path forward remains uncertain…   With several Fed governor’s sharing their uncertainty about the need for an additional year-end rate cut, and along with Chair Powell’s similar comments recently, the likelihood of a mid-December rate cut now stands at 75%.  Last week the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, the Personal Consumption Expenditure, was released with...Read More

Higher for longer after all… Equity markets participants showed their approval of the re-election of President Trump as the markets surged to record highs in the following days.  Further adding to market sentiment was Fed Chair Powell’s announcement of a quarter percentage point cut to the overnight lending rate. Some of the initial post-election market...Read More

Presidential Election & Federal Reserve meeting have market anxious… The Presidential election is finally here, and the race remains a dead heat with pollsters saying the race is a coin toss. Given how close the race is, a winner is not anticipated to be known for days. However, investors have been trying to position their...Read More

The Fed finally start reducing rates…   The long anticipated, and highly debated, initial interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve finally arrived. After the Fed’s mid-September meeting, Chair Jerome Powell announced a 50-basis point rate cut (bps or 0.50 percentage points) – the first rate cut in what is expected to be a succession...Read More

Hot jobs markets surprises many…   The Department of Labor released its September jobs report on Friday containing a number of surprises. The Street expected the unemployment rate to stay at its most recent 4.2% level, and instead the reading came in lower at 4.1%. Further, employers added 254,000 new positions in September which was...Read More

And the Fed finally takes action! •The day has finally come. Fed Chair Powell announced at his press conference last week that the Federal Reserve was cutting the Federal Funds rate by 0.50 percentage points. In the days leading up to the announcement, Wall Street odds had shifted to even on whether the Fed would...Read More

Attention shifting to employment data…   Markets continue their shift in focus away from inflation data points and towards the jobs data. Last Friday, the Labor Department released its August jobs report and Wall Street was not impressed. The popular S&P 500 index closed down 1.7% and ended the week with its largest weekly loss...Read More

Times, they are a changing… As Fed Chair Powell announced that “the time has come for policy to adjust” at his Jackson Hole speech last Friday. Of all of Powell’s recent public statements, this is the first time he has clearly and definitively communicated the central bank’s intention to start cutting the overnight Federal Funds...Read More

A tumultuous stretch as the markets eagerly look towards an initial rate cut… In early August, the broader stock market collapsed almost 7% in a matter of days on the back of July’s weak jobs report and the unwinding of the yen “carry trade.” Non-farm payrolls came in sharply beneath expectations at 114k as opposed...Read More