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Peter Jackson / January 3rd, 2024

Year End 2023 North American Equity Strategy

It seems like everyone in the investment world likes to use sports analogies to describe the current economic cycle and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s actions, which recently happened to be a pivot, generally known in the markets as the “Fed Pivot”. Team Powell has two coequal goals for monetary policy: those are maximum employment and low inflation. Exhibit 1 shows the evolution of the Federal Funds target rate (dot plots) by Federal Reserve Board members and Bank presidents. What was indicated at the Fed’s December meeting, and is confirmed in the charts below, was the “Fed Pivot”. That is, they did not raise rates for a third consecutive meeting but more importantly, the median projection for the Fed Funds target rate was lowered for 2024 and 2025.