MBS Live Morning: Fed Day! The Readiness is All

By the time we finally arrive at a much-anticipated Fed day, there's not much to do in the morning hours apart from the proverbial "hurry up and wait."  Or if you prefer Shakespeare, "the readiness is all."  So what special providence are we pondering?  The first place we'll be looking is in the text of the announcement itself for a change to the pace of tapering.  Immediately after that, it's the dot plot (Fed rate hike forecasts) that will have the biggest market moving potential.

It remains to be seen how big of an impact the dots might have on longer term rates like 10yr yields and mortgages.  There's certainly been a disconnect between rate hike expectations and long-term bonds since Powell started talking about inflation no longer being transitory (and accelerating tapering).  In the following chart, Fed funds futures are inverted because their price varies inversely with anticipated rate levels (aka, in this particular chart, the higher the blue line, the higher the expected Fed Funds Rate). 

In terms of bigger picture technicals, long-term yields are arguably perfectly centralized at 1.45-ish with the pandemic's post-crisis range being 1.15-1.75. Everything before that could be considered part of the courtship phase of the pandemic affectionately referred to below as "the darkest depths."  The implication is that yields near 1.75 represent some combination of economic optimism, hawkish Fed policy, inflation, and minimization of covid and rates near 1.15 represent some combination of the opposite of all of those things.  In other words, we're on the fence at 1.45.