Friends
As expected, the Fed did nothing today. The “not so much” anticipated FOMC meeting release indicated that the Fed is on hold with its current policies at least for a while longer. No mention of taper, which seems likely to have now been put off until early next year. With the Fed Chair transition of Bernanke to Yellen to unfold over the next few months, the Fed will be less of a player in the news stream for a while. Ok, so now what. Obamacare? No, watching Secretary Sebelius fall on her sword (at least I think she is) is great theatre, but not market moving. It looks like corporate earnings and economic data points will be the markets short term focus. As for those markets a weak ADP employment number and another benign CPI number set a soft tone for stocks in early trading, and after the Fed non-announcement in the early afternoon stocks lost even more ground.
For the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 61 points to close at 15,618. The S&P 500 was down 8 points to finish the day at 1763. Gold was down $.80 to trade at $1344 per ounce, while oil was down $1.52 to trade at $96.69 per barrel WTI.
Nowadays when the market is down at all, the media seems shocked. How could that happen? It’s been an amazing run this year which has kept those looking for a pullback wanting. The bulls have had all the fun so far this year. Let’s hope that some of this QE fueled party spills over into the economy which would benefit the middle class that so many politicians insist they are most concerned with. In the meantime, we’ll keep an eye on how the month ends.
Have a nice evening everyone.
