Investors might want to take Wednesday’s release of the latest Federal Reserve minutes with a grain of salt. But they’ll still be reading between every line.
The Federal Reserve will release the minutes of its March policy meeting on Wednesday, April 9.
The minutes, due out at 2 p.m. Eastern, cover the details of the Fed’s March 19-20 policy meeting, where officials held the federal-funds rate steady at a targeted range of 4.25%-4.50%, and signaled three quarter-percentage-point cuts by year-end.
But a lot has happened since then.
Stocks have plummeted since President Donald Trump unveiled his global tariff plan on April 2, and many economists now forecast a recession later this year. Fed Chair Jerome Powell struck a more hawkish tone in a speech on April 4, warning that “we face a highly uncertain outlook with elevated risks of both higher unemployment and higher inflation.”
Traders are now pricing in four rate cuts this year, according to CME’s FedWatch tool.
The minutes may be a snapshot from a different, pre-tariff moment, but they still offer a look at how unified, or not, Fed officials were in leaving rates unchanged in March.
“There was a lot of dispersion and uncertainty around Fed officials’ forecasts at the [March] meeting,” said Idanna Appio, a senior analyst on the First Eagle Global Value team.
Appio says she’ll be looking for signs of internal disagreement, particularly around the impact of tariffs, inflation risks, and labor market strength. Any clues to the Fed’s thinking could take on new significance, given how rapidly the economic and market outlook has changed, she said.
Wall Street will also be reading the minutes for signs that officials were concerned about financial stability. Credit markets have grown more fragile since March, and volatility is climbing. If the Fed was already wary of underlying stress, investors may reassess how committed officials are to holding rates steady.
Another issue is the future of the Fed’s balance sheet. The central bank has been shrinking its holdings of bonds in an effort to tighten financial conditions, but Powell recently signaled that the process could slow or stop as soon as June. The minutes might show how close officials are to making that decision. Investors will be looking for any sign that the Fed is ready to shift course, especially as liquidity concerns start to creep back into markets.
Powell insists the Fed is data dependent. Wednesday’s minutes may clarify what kinds of data officials were most focused on in March. But sometimes the most telling insights come from the nuances of the language used.
“What the seasoned Fed watchers will look for are bad, convoluted sentences,” said Jake Schurmeier, a portfolio manager at Harbor Capital and who previously worked at the New York Fed. “Having worked at the Fed, I’ve seen that the creation of sentences like these come from a ton of disagreement between policymakers.”
Appio, who also spent more than 15 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, will look for key words like “transitory” or “persistent” to see how officials frame inflation. And she’ll be paying attention to so-called counting words like “a few,” “many,” or “a majority,” that quantify the divisions among policymakers.
The next Federal Open Market Committee meeting of Fed policymakers is scheduled for May 6-7.
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