These are sensitive times.
For the longest time the FOMC and investors were the closest of allies.
The FOMC gave investors what they craved.
With cheap money increasingly made available investors could do what they want to do the most.
Invest.
In return, if you believe in trickle down economics, the great wealth created by investors would then get re-invested into the economy, helping to fund the creation of jobs, which in turn would fuel increasing demand for consumer products.
That would result in a virtuous cycle that would grow the economy, with the FOMC carefully controlling growth to keep the 40 years’ worth of inflation fears soothed.
Surely that was a win – win scenario, in theory, at least.
Then came the rumors.
Those rumors were started, fueled and spread by the very FOMC that created good times for most everyone that had a discretionary dollar to invest.
The fear that those rumors of an interest rate increase coming soon, perhaps a series of them in 2016, would become reality, periodically sowed selling waves into the blackened hearts of investors.
With even the doves among the FOMC members beginning to utter tones spoken by hawks, investors knew that their glory days were numbered and began expressing some slow acceptance of an interest rate increase.