Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, May 8th, and today we are talking FOMC Day.

Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it,

give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation,

come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly

slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, back with a bit of a macro update today.

We have kind of blissfully not had to cover that much macro this week.

There's been plenty of crypto stories.

But we did have an FOMC meeting.

There are things going on with trade deals.

So count this as our catch-up for the week.

And the TLDR of this is that risks are rising in the economy,

but the Fed is in wait and C mode. In fact, yesterday was one of the quietest Federal Reserve meetings of the cycle. Rates were held steady. There was no announcement of a change

to the quantitative tightening policy. Basically, this was a meeting with zero policy

change and barely even a change in guidance. The only material change to the policy statement,

in fact, was a recognition that, quote, risks of higher unemployment and higher inflation have risen.

Essentially, the committee sees both sides of their mandate at risk of deteriorating at the same time.

With that framing, it seems the Fed isn't waiting because they're satisfied that policy

is appropriate over the medium term.

They're paralyzed until hard data tells them which direction to move.

In other words, they're just stuck waiting for the next year to drop.

...