Five things you need to know before you go on vacation

You can tell a lot of policy makers are taking off for the holidays because an awful lot worth noting yesterday happened.

Fed Raises Interest Rates

The Fed Reserve’s Open Market Committee announced that it would be raising short-term interest rates by another quarter of a point. Perhaps more importantly however, Federal Reserve Chairman indicated that the Fed was reducing the number of its anticipated rate hikes for 2019 from 4 to 3. In his post-game press conference Powell explained that while the economy remains fundamentally strong, developments of the last few months indicate that there may be complications ahead. Apparently this was too much equivocation for the captains of industry who invest in the stock market. I’m assuming they wanted a more negative assessment of the economy’s growth to signal that the fed was putting any rate hikes on hold for the foreseeable future. Dream on.

 

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