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, welcome to D.C. today. It is March 20th here on Wednesday. It's great to be with you on this nice update in markets, really. The

market was completely flat all morning into the Fed decision, which came out at 2 Eastern. And so we

just sort of traded sideways in anticipation of that. And then Fed statements were unchanged on

interest rates, which was, of course, expected at 100% Fed Funds futures.

We knew that part.

What was the market was waiting on was whether they were going to change some of their expectations

on future rate cuts for the year, which is in their dot plots.

That was reiterated today.

So they're still looking at cutting rates by 75 basis points by the

end of the year. That's what tipped markets to the positive side. And then we went from basically

a zero level roughly to up over 401 points on the Dow. So it's a nice update. We closed at all-time

highs for Dow for the S&P, for the NASDAQ, and rates were pretty

sanguine.

The yield curve steepened a little bit, but 10-year came in two bases points lower.

The two-year was down about six basis points.

So you just had lower rates across the curve with expectations that the Fed, while we're not

quite back to 2%, they did a

couple of things on the economic forecasting. So they moved up GDP forecast from 1.4% to 2%, which is a

meaningful increase in growth, which is a good thing. They moved unemployment lower, also a good

thing. It was at 4.1 estimated by the end of the year now, it's at 4%.

And then they took PCE core, which is their favorite number to use for inflation up a

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