Welcome to the DC Today, your daily market synopsis of the Dividing Cafe, brought to you every Monday through Thursday to bring you up-to-date information and perspective on financial markets.

Hello and welcome to D.C. today. My name is Brian Saitel. It's Wednesday, June 21st. And I'm coming at you here live, first day of summer of

2023. I hope everyone has some fun plans in the calendar with family and kids and all that.

And I know this is exactly what you were looking for, just the same as when you were kids entering

summer as to get a market action breakdown and some

inflation talk and federal reserve talk. But nonetheless, I've got it all for you and I'll sort of

go through the day. The futures hung in there okay last night. Obviously, yesterday was a down day

in the stock market. Markets actually opened lower, call it 150, 160, maybe a little bit more points on the day.

There was a Fed testimony today on Capitol Hill that markets were sort of anticipating

to see what Jerome Powell would say next about rates and the Fed and the economy and inflation

and all that.

I mean, we just had their meeting last week.

So it's been all of what two or three days here. So I don't know. Markets were really expecting a whole lot. But market ended up closing on the day off of the lows, although it did pull back a little bit. It was down about 102 points on the day. Rates on the long end of the curve, didn't move a lot. 10-year treasury was up two basis points, closed at 372, basically unchanged, more or less.

Short-term rates have moved. The last couple of days, you've seen something like a six-month treasury move up about ten basis points, which is a little more meaningful. So like on a day like today, you've got some sell-off in some of those more interest rate sectors of the market. Technology was the

worst performing sector today. It was down about 1.4%. And utilities were up, which is a real interest

rate sensitive part of the market. They were up something like 0.8% on the day. All in all,

I felt like today was sort of a real start to summer, which is it was kind of a quiet day

in markets. Not a lot of

volatility. Volatility came down again a little bit today, but there was some good news to go

through. So speaking of the Fed, so Jerome Powell answered his barrage of questions from Congress,

basically stuck to the same message, which is that the July meeting is a live meeting,

that they may raise rates, but it's all data dependent. But if you look at their dot plots, which is sort of their estimate of where rates are going to go, they see 50 basis points more increase before the end of the year. So call it two more 25 basis point hikes. He affirmed that. He basically said, just look at that and that's about what we think. And so you get a good picture of it. Markets actually rallied a little bit on that. He basically said, just look at that and that's about what we think. And so you get a

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