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, September 21st, and today we are going macro, talking about the FOMC conference, what it means, where in the cycle we are, but before we get to all of that, 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 of the show notes or go to bit.

ly slash breakdown pod. Well, friends, hallelujah, we have an episode that is not about

Binance or the SEC. Yes, today we are talking macro. And I have to say, it feels like we are

in the culmination of a phase.

We know that we are close to the top from an interest rate perspective, but we don't know if

we're actually there.

We don't know how real economic conditions are going to change things.

We certainly don't know when we're going to start heading the other direction and having

rates come down.

And we're still living in this weird limbo where things don't feel great, but we aren't in a recession. And so you take

all of these factors together, and I think that people were watching this FOMC meeting just a little

bit more closely than we have for the last few. The TLDR on what actually happened is that Federal Reserve

officials decided to hold rates steady between 5.25 and 5.5%.

Now, this is the second straight meeting with no change in policy settings, with the Fed funds rate remaining at 22-year highs.

And because there is always a key word or a key phrase when it comes to these FOMC meetings, this one was definitely proceed

carefully. During his press conference, Fed Chair Jerome Powell emphasized that despite strong

economic data since the last meeting, the FOMC were in a position to, you guessed it,

proceed carefully. Now, this phrase was repeated six times throughout media questioning,

always to some extent around

an assertion that the committee didn't need to make any decisions quite yet about what was coming next.

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