With gold up 15% since The Fed hiked in December (and stocks lower) and the market pricing a hike today at just 4% (June 53%), it is not surprising that Janet panicced and folded again in the face of "unequivocally good" data based on what The Fed has said it monitors. Of course there were plenty of excuses:
Market breadth momentum contonues to weaken as the S&P 500 grinds higher, setting up a bearish outcome similar to the early November 2015 top. As BofAML's Stephen Suttmeier warns a break below channel support at 1989 would signal an interim top.
With the market already pricing in dramatically fewer rate-hikes that the "cheerleading" Fed, Deutsche Bank expects the USD to respond favorably to the FOMC’s signals on Wednesday, contrary to the pattern seen after the last four FOMC meetings with press conferences.
The waning influence of the Fed’s projections is showing up in derivatives markets. After the December revision to the projected path of interest rates, traders responded much less than they did earlier in the year in the market for derivatives known as overnight-indexed swaps.
Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,
Talk about sheep being led to the slaughter. The S&P 500 is up 11% from its February 11th intra-day low (1812) because Wall Street still has inventory to unload. That much is par for the course.
One of the biggest false narratives pitched by the mainstream to mitigate concerns about a global recession, is that even as China's massively overlevered manufacturing sector is careening into a hard landing, China's "strong" consumer base will keep the country's economy afloat (a narrative shared with the U.S.), even though as reported over the past weekend retail sales soundly disappointed expectations, while the latest proxy of China's consumer strenth, namely "record" box office receipts, was recently uncovered to have been - like everything else in China - mostly fabricated.