You're listening to Closing Bell in Progress.

Welcome to Closing Bell, I'm Mike Santoli.

In for Scott Wopner, you have just been listening to Federal Reserve Chair

Jay Powell, the Fed, keeping both interest rates

and its outlook for potential cuts this year

unchanged the markets embracing that status quo the S&P 500 lifting to a new

intraday record high above 5200 the. The prior inter day higher around 5189. Of course, any rise today is a new

closing high. You see the Nasdaq up 1% Russell 2000 small caps outperforming up 1.6% now Treasury yields relaxing a bit

lower but mostly on the short end as we sort of get a little more confidence that

the Fed anticipates three quarter point rate cuts perhaps by the end of this year the 10 year

moving less so you see a little bit of re-stepening of the curve maybe that suggests

that the more tolerance for some warmer inflation.

But I would say, in general, Chair Powell talks about the balance of risks between employment

and inflation roughly equal, but he's not particularly concerned about any of them so let's

get to uh... josh brown he is uh... CEO rithal 12th management

Liz young

uh... so-fai uh... head of investment strategy just to break this down a little bit Josh

market seemed to take the absence of any hawkish surprise as as a positive. It's like we were in a strong market before

The chair is unconcerned seemingly about the little bit of an

uptick in inflation and so therefore kind of game on. Yeah my big takeaway that

is really that they're going to slow the pace of balance sheet runoff, which I found, I guess, to be something unique.

I also think they're talking about it, but they haven't decided anything up, but it's definitely an occasion.

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