From a small northwestern observatory…

I don’t mean to be snide, but pretty much everything released today was fully discounted in the market.  For a great and detailed synopsis of today’s release, see Jeff Cox’s excellent article at CNBC here.

The short answer is that the FED will keep the benchmark funds rate at 1.50%-1.75% for the time being.  (Market prognosticators foresee no changes at least thru the end of the 3rd quarter.). Of more interest, the Open Market Committee has agreed to continue its repo activities for the time being.  This has been described by some as a form of quantitative easing, and has boosted FED reserves to over $4 Trillion — not unlike the explosion in the monetary base we saw after the 2008 meltdown.  Indeed, very little of the monetary expansion from that era had been liquidated before the current operations began.

Graphic courtesy SeekingAlpha.com, October 24, 2019.

The repo process allows banks to sell high-grade instruments to the FED in trade for much-needed liquidity.  One can pretty much track the stock market performance of late to the repo activity.  Forecasters generally predicted a continuation of this, and not surprisingly the S&P has performed well, if not spectacularly, since the announcement today.

For the initiated, there are actually two “FEDs”.  The 7-member Federal Reserve Board oversees the operation of the Federal Reserve System itself.  The meat-and-potatoes policies, such as today’s, are the province of the Fed Open Market Committee, made up of the 7 fed members, the president of the NY Fed Bank, and 4 of the other 11 bank presidents (a rotating membership).  There is no rule that the FED chair also chair the FOMC, but that’s been the custom since 1935 when the FOMC was created.