50 bips it is from The Fed.
There's a problem: Immediately -- literally, within seconds -- the IRX, or 13 week bill continuous contract rate, moved to 4.6% maintaining a spread below Fed Funds.
In other words the market moved first and now the market is leading Powell around by the nose demanding even more.
I don't care what Powell says, I care what the market does. Further, the long end came up slightly -- but by no means anywhere near as much as the IRX went the other way. The IRX/TNX spread remains deeply negative -- where it should be positive because time always has value, and an inverted relationship is a declaration that time has negative value.
The prime tool Powell has is his mouth, followed closely by the behind-the-scenes transactions run out of the NY Fed desk at their direction. That's pretty-much it, and the latter can make huge losses if the market calls "BS!" on the former. The Fed, unlike a private firm, can't go "bankrupt" but losses are directly negative to Treasury because normally The Fed remits all of its income, less its operating expenses, to Treasury. When it makes losses it remits nothing until the loss it has on the books is recovered, and the greater the loss the longer that will be. That is, said losses are in fact additive to the deficit albeit not on a direct and immediate basis.
My first-blush read: Instability between The Fed and markets, in a marketplace where large, established firms are running at four to five times sane Price:Sales ratios, is exactly the sort of situation that sets up extraordinarily large draw-downs (aka a "crash") when (not if) a triggering event occurs. Like, perhaps, realization that a negative ROI in a business doesn't become a positive one with a rate cut, and if the problem is price (and it is) cutting borrowing costs not only don't resolve the problem doing that makes it worse.
