Today the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee said it will The Federal Reserve said it will be “patient” on any future interest-rate increases. moves. And it will be flexible and “prepared to adjust any of the details for completing balance sheet normalization in light of economic and financial developments.”
The stock market heard “patient” to mean that the Fed will be on an indefinite pause in raising interest rates. And “flexible” mean that the U.S. central bank is close to a pause or maybe even an end in its $50 billion a month in balance sheet reductions. (Which Wall Street has come to see as a more important tightening of the money supply than increases in short-term interest rates.”
And with that a rally based on better than expected earnings from Apple (AAPL) yesterday and from genuinely great earnings from Boeing (BA) this morning, took another leg upward. As of 2:45 p.m. New York time the Standard & Poor’s 500 was up 1.52% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was ahead 1.69%. (Boeing is the heaviest-weighted component in the Dow.) The NASADAQ Composite was ahead 1.79% on strong moves from Apple up 6.96% Microsoft (MSFT) ahead 3.02% before today’s earnings report, and Amazon (AMZN) gaining 4.95% before tomorrow’s earnings announcement scheduled for after the close.
The VIX fear index fell 5.75% to 18.03.
