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Newly led Fed poses wildcard for rockier US indexes By Reuters Investing.comWarsh Caught Between Trump and Bond Market Betting on Rate Hikes Bloomberg.comWhat should investors expect from Kevin Warsh's first Fed meeting? Financial TimesFor Warsh as Fed chair, silence may be the point CNBC
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Bessent said the energy-fed inflation surge recently is likely to reverse as the U.S. is "going to keep pumping."
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The Federal Reserve served up a widely expected third consecutive jumbo rate hike when it concluded its regularly scheduled two-day meeting on Wednesday. Chair Jerome Powell and the rest of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) raised the federal funds rate by 75 basis points. (A basis point equals 0.01%.)
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Although the move matched consensus expectations, a significant portion of the bond market - and plenty of traders and tacticians, for that matter - were bracing for a whopping 100 bp rate hike. Uncertainty over just how hawkish the Fed would reveal itself to be has cast a pall on equities over the preceding weeks, and so a rate hike of "only" three-quarters of a percentage point was actually met with some relief. Stocks sold off sharply when the Fed released its statement at 2 p.m. Eastern, but then drifted back into positive territory during Powell's press conference, which began a half-hour later.
Ultimately, however, the major indexes finished in the red. That's because the Fed's bottom line is that inflation is by no means under control. And while there might be ample anecdotal and emotional evidence pointing to the contrary, the economy is simply running too hot. An imbalance in supply and demand in the labor market and related strong real wage growth, snarled supply chains and a rising dollar are just some of the factors confounding monetary policymakers - not to mention corporate revenues and profit margins.
As we've
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