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Risk Indicators - CME FedWatch
One of the primary drivers of the bull market on Wall Street during the past decade was the accommodative monetary policy of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). The FOMC not only kept interest rates at virtually 0% from late-2008 through late-2015 but also injected billions of dollars into the economy by buying U.S. Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities.
While most analysts anticipate the FOMC is done buying assets in the near term, many are starting to price in the possibility the FOMC may start cutting interest rates again.
Currently, the target range for the Federal Funds rate – the short-term interest rate the FOMC tries to control – is 2.25% to 2.50%. Sometimes you will see this written as 225-250 basis points (bps).
The FOMC set this target range at its monetary policy meeting in December 2018. However, at that same meeting, the FOMC signaled that it was done raising interest rates for a while because it felt that inflationary pressure was no longer a threat and it didn’t want to risk stifling economic growth.
Typically, the FOMC will lower interest rates to stimulate the economy – because lower interest rates make it easier for businesses and individuals to finance growth through borrowing. Conversely, the FOMC will raise interest rates to combat inflation – because higher interest rates make it more difficult to for businesses and individuals to borrow, increase the money supply and drive prices higher.
Interestingly, even though the U.S. economy is currently showing strong numbers, an increasing number of traders is starting to anticipate the FOMC is going to start lowering interest rates again by the end of the year to combat potential recessionary pressures in 2020 and beyond.
You can see this by looking at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME)’s FedWatch tool, which tracks trader sentiment toward the FOMC.
Looking at the FedWatch tool estimates for the December 2019 FOMC monetary policy meeting in the chart below, you can see that traders estimate there is only a 24% chance the FOMC will leave the Federal Funds rate at its current range of 225-250 basis points past December.
Traders are pricing in a 41.8% chance the FOMC will cut rates by 25 basis points (to a range of 200-225 bps) and a 26.2% chance the FOMC will cut rates by 50 basis points (to a range of 175-200 bps).
All told, traders are currently pricing in a 76% chance of an interest-rate cut before the end of the year. To put this in perspective, traders were only pricing in a 65% chance of a rate cut one month ago.
If they are correct, and the FOMC is going to cut rates, we have to imagine that the FOMC is going to be doing so in reaction to a slowdown in economic growth.
I’m going to be watching these numbers closely. If traders continue to price in an increasingly greater chance of a rate cut by the end of the year, we have to imagine those same traders the chance of a pullback in the stock market is also increasing.
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