US Federal Reserve

While Yellen still speaks in her historic "first rate hike in years" press conference, the sellside has already shared its kneejerk reaction to the Fed's announcement, and as Citi notes, "It’s calm on the floor considering the first rate hike in years. More attention on WTI crude, which remains 4% lower to 35.80 after DOE inventory build."

More from Citi:

Our Treasury desk notes real money flow in front end with better buying around the 2-year point as its yield briefly popped above 1%. Little seen in the back end.

 

Perhaps even more important than the actual rate hike announcement, the one statement the market was particularly focused on was the Fed's "implementation note", which lays out the Fed's thought process on how it will actually raise rates in order to maintain the Fed Funds in the 0.25%-0.50% range.

There was much expectation that the Fed's announcement would be a Dovish hike based on a reduction in the 2016 median dot, however the Fed did not do that, and instead while the Kocherlakota negative dot was removed, the FOMC kept the median 2016 fed funds rate at 1.4% for year end, suggesting 4 rate hikes during 2016 and that the market is underestimating the pace of rate increases.

Where there was some dovishness was in the 2017 year end median FF, which was reduced from 2.6% to 2.4%. This can be seen in the compared dot plots.

In her first post-rate-hike press conference, Janet Yellen is about to go to extreme lengths to explain just how dovishly bullish raising interest rates is, despite leaving the Fed Funds forecast unchanged since September (i.,e. not dovish). We look forward to her explaining why she is raising rates now - as opposed to September - as economic data has nosedived and the market has done a significant job on contracting credit already. We also look forward to her explaining how, if rate hikes on the path to normalization are so awesome, why is the willingness to do it so low?

Well, liftoff has officially begun. 

Assuming 25 bps doesn't tip EM into crisis and/or trigger some kind of dramatic, unforeseen meltdown elsewhere, the Fed is about to embark on the first rate hike cycle in over a decade. 

Of course the hike itself isn't what's interesting - virtually no one thought the Fed would fold again, even as China did its best to create a bit of pre-Yellen drama by stirring up the deval fears with a nod to a new trade-weighted index for the yuan.