Jerome Powell woke up the US indices, which had been fairly asleep since the end of February or March 12, with a bang, and investors reactivated the buying programs that had been dormant for a week.

Wall Street ended the day at its highest level ever, on a flurry of absolute records, often in the form of intraday/close doubles.
Starting with the Dow Jones, which gained 1.05% to 39,512, followed by the S&P-500, with +0.9% to 5,225 points (first incursion beyond 5,200Pts).

The Nasdaq Composite gained 1.25% to 16,370, the closing zenith... but no double, as it missed the 16,450 of March 8 by 0.45%.

The Nasdaq-100 (+1.15%) settled for its 3rd-best closing in history at 18.240, in the wake of the semiconductor sector, which rallied, with Broadcom +3.5%, Paypal +3.2%, NXP +2.5%, Micron +2.4%, KLA and global Founders +2.2%, Nvidia +1.1%

The titans Apple and Amazon gained +1.5% and +1.3%, Alphabet took +1.2% and Tesla jumped +2.5%.

What is it that has so euphorized Wall Street and restored confidence bordering on complacency, with the VIX easing -5.7% towards 13.00?

The most common post-session headline is that Jerome Powell has "reassured" the markets by confirming his forecast of three interest rate cuts this year... despite inflation being slow to approach 2%.

He considered that the recent 'higher than expected' inflation data had not altered the overall view of the situation, namely that 'inflation is coming down gradually', in a less linear fashion than before.
How can we be pleased with such a speech when just 3 months earlier, expectations were varying between 7 and 8 rate cuts, the first of which should have taken place this very Wednesday?

In fact, the feeling that the FED is being more accommodating than expected lies in this somewhat unexpected announcement: "the FED will reduce the pace of liquidation of its bond portfolio"... which amounts to a kind of quantitative easing of its monetary policy, which is thus becoming less restrictive.

This message was received 5 out of 5 by financial stocks, which collectively jumped by more than 2%, with Comerica and Citizens Fnl +3.8%, Capital One +3.6%, Morgan Staley +3.3%, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs +2%.

But no fewer than 9 of the eleven sectors making up the S&P-500 ended the session in the green, five of them gaining at least 1%.

The perception of fixed-income specialists seems to be quite different from that of equity managers: the '10-yr' only eased by one more point after J.Powell's press conference, i.e. -2.4Pts to 4.269%, while the '30-yr' even deteriorated by +1Pt to 4.4540%.


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