After Wednesday's Fed meeting, Snider spoke with Yahoo Finance to reaffirm that he is unmoved by anything Powell stated during the press conference. He referenced the post-January Fed meeting projection update from Goldman's economics team. Despite shifting its forecast for the first rate drop from March to May, Goldman still expects eight 25 basis point decreases over the next two years.
This storyline has also been confirmed in Bloomberg's consensus projections. Despite Powell's remarks and last week's excellent employment report, the market still expected interest rates to finish 2024 at 4% as of Friday. That level remains unchanged from the previous two months.
Taken together, this suggests that, according to some optimistic strategists, nothing has changed about the tale for 2024 and even 2025.
Like Snider, Oppenheimer investment chief strategist John Stoltzfus thinks short-term investors should not stress over when the Federal Reserve will decrease rates.
"When you look at the trading floors and the trading rooms, what they trade on is very different than what intermediate to long-term money managers like myself are going to be looking at," Stoltzfus explained to Yahoo Finance Live. "What we look at is: We don't think the Fed has thus far pushed the economy into a recession.
A lot of bulls, like Brian Belski of BMO, would rather not guess where the Fed will set interest rates.
Earnings and other basic fundamentals are usually the ones they cite instead. Earnings growth is still anticipated for the next two years, as noted by TKer editor Sam Ro in the most recent Yahoo Finance Chartbook edition.
There’s actually no analytical evidence that we’re seeing any kind of earnings slowdown,” Belski told Yahoo Finance in a recent phone interview.
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