FOMC Policy- Zerohedge has a nice recap which makes sense to me. Rephrasing, the Bank of Canada and New York Fed's Bill Dudley are essentially saying that we have the Japanese disease when it comes to inflation, so the Central Bankers are going to cut their targets. This enables them to go ahead with policy normalization and deflate the asset bubbles they have created.
Yesterday I put up somebody's chart showing Apple accounted for 20% of the gains since the Fed started printing money. Add in the rest of the FAANGs and I am confident you can see where over half the printing ended up. By theory this is normal as the stock market is very large and liquid so it is very capable of being the place that absorbs surplus liquidity ( and provides it when the system is running the other way). With Chair Yellen's further amplification today it is clear the risk is on the other side and the Fed no longer has anybody's back. At the same time I am confident that the current FOMC does not want to be blamed for a major recession during their watch. But they are all gone by the end of 2018 so the push will be on to have something close to normal policy in place by then. She used all the well know weasel words, but it was clear rates are going up and they will go up regularly. Remember Goldman just revised their year end targets to reflect this policy and they are expecting S&P 2600 at the end of 2019.
As they say the first player out of a bad trade is just a good trader, everybody else panicked. I am not ready to short the FAANGs but I do think this signals the beginning of the end for this era. Between the Buzzfeed article two weeks ago, this Fed decision, the failed Apple launch, the Google spanking by the EU, Facebook's Russian advertisers and Amazon's venture into groceries I am thinking the hedge funds have to be nervous.