The Federal Reserve met this week and decided not to change interest rates. Journalists counted to five. Called them takeaways.
This is what passes for analysis now. The Fed does exactly what everyone expected. Financial media writes "five big takeaways" because three sounds lazy and seven sounds like they're trying too hard. Five is the Goldilocks number for people who need their market commentary pre-chewed into bite-sized pellets of absolutely nothing.
Somewhere right now a retail trader is reading all five takeaways. Taking notes. Highlighting sentences. He's got a system, see. He reads the Fed statement. Cross-references it with three different newsletter writers who all say the same thing in slightly different fonts. Then he buys calls on whatever stock Reddit told him about yesterday. This is called research.
The Fed could've released a statement that just said "rates unchanged, stop f*cking emailing us" and it would've contained the same informational value. But then CNBC would have four fewer segments to fill. Bloomberg would lose an entire day of content. Some guy named Kevin wouldn't get to explain what "dovish" means for the eight hundredth time this year.
The part that really stings is knowing someone got paid to extract five takeaways from a meeting where the main takeaway was that nothing happened. That's the job. Sit through the announcement. Watch Powell talk. Then squeeze out five bullet points that could've been one sentence: They didn't move rates and you still can't trade for sh*t.
But retail needs those five takeaways. Needs them formatted. Needs them numbered. Needs to screenshot them and post them in the group chat like they just cracked the Da Vinci Code. When really they're just reading a grocery list someone else wrote while they were also not paying attention.
The Fed meets eight times a year and every single time financial media pretends this one was different.
Photo by Cesar Done on Unsplash
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