MBS RECAP: Bonds Surge After Surprisingly Friendly FOMC Minutes

I'm not going to launch into a detailed assessment of every passage in today's FOMC Minutes.  Instead, I'm going to talk about how the Fed has been making me feel, and how today's FOMC Minutes changed that.

If you've read my thoughts on the matter before, this will be familiar.  Generally speaking, the Fed has given the impression that they're inexplicably married to the idea of hiking rates ASAP at all costs.  It started out without much justification at all.  The Fed talked about things like wages being set to improve and inflation being transitory. 

When those justifications from the earlier stages of the rhetoric didn't pan out, the Fed shifted gears and admitted just how long it might be before finding traction in inflation.  Even then, they didn't change their stance on rate hike timing.  If inflation wouldn't be back to 2% for years, where was the justification?  They were able to lean on reasonably strong employment data, but the absence of meaningful wage growth makes it hard to conclude that job creation will have a desired effect on inflation. 

It was at that point that the rhetoric shifted gears and began to include thoughts on financial stability, damage to bank deposits from a lack of interest (literally) among savers, and some weird desire to be ahead of the game when it came to inflation picking back up.  The phrase "grasping at straws" comes to mind. 

Eventually, markets came to terms with the fact that the Fed just really really wanted to hike and the justifications didn't much matter.  Or so they thought!  Today's FOMC Minutes painted a different picture.  They gave life to the Fed's heretofore glib assertion that a rate hike was "data-dependent."  Despite the fact that the actual policy statement had a hawkish tone (bad for rates), today's minutes were unmistakably dovish (good for rates).  The Fed paid good attention to the risks and left me with the impression that they might not be so keen to hike after all, if the troubling trends continue.

This is a double-edged sword though.  It means that if global markets manage to find stability in the problem areas any time soon and that if domestic data is reasonably strong, the Fed won't have any more reasons to hold off.  For now, it's a good day that has a chance of turning into more good days.