Heads Up on This Week’s Fed Speak

“The big show this week will be a speech on Wednesday from Fed Chair Ben Bernanke.

It’s titled: “The First 100 Years of the Federal Reserve: The Policy Record, Lessons Learned, and Prospects for the Future” and there’s going to be a Q&A.

So he could really talk about anything, including, perhaps, his own future (fingers crossed).

Fedspeak is always a market obsession, but lately that obsession has been turned to 11, given all of the concern about slowing the pace of QE, and how far we are from the first rate hike. Lately the “ZIRP4EVA” crowd has gone pretty silent, and markets are pricing in the possibility of a rate hike sometime in late 2014, in part due to shifts in the Fed’s language, and in part because the pace of job creation has accelerated. In recent months, the economy has been averaging nearly 200K jobs created, which is a nice step up from the approximately 150K pace from months’ previous.

So Bernanke’s speech on Wednesday will be watched ultra-closely.

What will he say?…”

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