While Teeka Tiwari and Nomi Prins and the rest of the chattering marketers were trying to panic us about how the Federal Reserve and President Biden would be itching to “recall” our US Dollars and take all our money and remove financial privacy on December 13, it turns out that the Fed was actually quietly preparing a best-ever Christmas gift for the stock market: As the announcement made clear when Jerome Powell came to the podium after the Dec 12-13 meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, inflation is finally falling close to “normal” levels and looking stable, and the Fed is more likely to cut interest rates next year than to raise them again… and they might even cut them three times, if the average guess of the voting FOMC governors is at all accurate (it probably won’t be, but you gotta start somewhere).

And, of course, there was no announcement from the Fed about the much-feared “FedCoin” or any nefarious plans to expand the surveillance state and steal your money. Because of course, those plans are top secret, so gosh, I guess Teeka’s ad campaign can get fired back up now with January 31, 2024 as the day “Joe Biden is gonna recall your dollars!” (that’s the next Fed meeting). Not to pick on Teeka Tiwari particularly, there are a lot of folks running these fearmongering campaigns about a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) stealing your money and your freedom, I just wrote about Teeka’s most recently so that’s fresh in my mind.

Sure, Jerome Powell’s Christmas present for the market (or given the timing, Hanukkah present), is not as exciting as the five or six interest rate cuts that the betting market has priced in for 2024… but it also doesn’t imply the economic disaster that would portend. Remember, if the Fed has to cut interest rates six times next year, it probably won’t be because everything’s still going great and we have low unemployment. The vibe that came out of that Fed meeting was awfully bullish for stocks and bonds and pretty much everything else, just a couple months after the clear consensus had been that rates might keep rising next year as inflation stays out of control, and could stay at these high levels for many years.

Not that this means we know what’s going to happen next year, or that the Fed knows… sentiment ...