Happy Holidays. The FOMC wants to wish you a very merry year-end. They pulled off a dual rally in bonds and equities by putting significantly more balance sheet in everyone's stockings paired with a rate cut and unchanged projections for modest further easing. That offset the fact that Chair Powell conditionally leaned toward taking a breather on further policy rate adjustments in favour of seeing how the economy performs after 175bps of cumulative cuts from the 5.5% peak last year and 75bps since September. Conditional, that is, upon how missing data evolves. That’s all very, very tentative with a shelf life ... (full story)