Trading The FOMC
With the market already pricing in dramatically fewer rate-hikes that the "cheerleading" Fed,Deutsche Bank expects the USD to respond favorably to the FOMC’s signals on Wednesday,contrary to the pattern seen after the last four FOMC meetings with press conferences.
The waning influence of the Fed’s projections is showing up in derivatives markets. After the December revision to the projected path of interest rates, traders responded much less than they did earlier in the year in the market for derivatives known as overnight-indexed swaps.
But, as Deutsche's Alan Ruskin notes, the likely comment on the balance of risks will be one indication that all upcoming FOMC meetings are "live." Among the conundrums facing the Fed, are how much weight to place in the predictive powers of the past (USD led) tightening in financial conditions; and the signal from a flatter yield curve...
Table 1 shows how FX and bond markets have typically registered much larger (absolute) one day price changes on days when FOMC’s end with a press conference than when they don’t. These FOMC press conference daily moves also vastly exceed the sustained reaction on payroll days. The reasons are not hard to find – FOMC days with press conferences, have the Fed Chair Q&A, as well as the economic projections and the notorious dot plot to respond to.
On these main elements, we expect the March meeting to break as follows:
i) The dot plot. DB’s econ team expects the median dots to come down by 25bps for all of 2016, 2017, 2018 and the longer-run. Prima facie this may seem dovish but the dots will have to come down by more than this, especially the 2016 dot, to be seen as genuinely bullish, because the market is pricing in so much less than the Fed projects. The market has less tightening priced in for the end of 2018 than the Dec FOMC median dot for the end of 2016!
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