Good morning,

A day 50+ years in the making. For those of you who aren’t at 11 Wall Street there is a blue and orange sea of humanity in lower Manhattan which has reportedly already exceeded 3 million people and that was >2 hours before the parade begins. Outside of the celebration, today is the last trading day in a holiday shortened week but it will be an interesting session as markets continue to digest yesterday’s Fed meeting, the official signing of the Iran MOU and the fact that it is a triple witch expiration and the S&P quarterly index rebalance. Expect some additional volatility and a surge in volume particularly around the close as we’ve consistently been breaking records associated with this event over the last few years given the increase in derivatives activity.

There's a new sheriff in town. In a bloodless transfer of power, Kevin Warsh assumed the Fed Chair role from Jerome Powell and quickly put his stamp on things. A unanimous vote by the FOMC left the target rate unchanged at 3.5% to 3.75%. The statement shortened dramatically (130 words from 237 for those counting) and removed the easing bias as expected. The SEP, which didn’t include projections from the Chair, evolved in a hawkish manner. The press conference had a very different tone as well. The overarching themes as we saw it were “changes are a comin”, “just the facts ma’am”, "forward guidance is a thing of the past" (well at least “not well-suited to the current policy conjuncture”), “there's a task force for that”, and a commitment to deliver price stability. Taking the eraser to the Statement and removal of forward guidance provided a lead-in to potentially dramatic changes to how the Fed operates overall. To that end, Warsh announced the creation of five task forces that will take a "fresh look" at things and make recommendations for to move the “Fed forward”.