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The Fed's Statement could hardly have been more bullish for stocks in the short-term. This was the key sentence:


In other words: "We will keep printing aggressively until the job market improves, up to the point where inflation becomes a problem."

Another important sentence was:


By saying that they will continue high levels of "accommodation" after the recovery strengthens implicitly suggests that the Fed is willing to risk inflation for the sake of supporting employment growth.

Bernanke strongly reinforced a bullish interpretation of the Fed statement. In particular, he stated that the Fed would not "rush" to raise rates once the economic recovery accelerated. In particular, he seemed to hint that the Fed would tolerate core inflation of over 2% by saying that the Fed would seek to be "balanced" in bringing its inflation and employment back to their targets. Since the Fed's target for the core is already at 2% this strongly suggests that Bernanke perceives the future need to bring inflation down to its target in the future (after it has overshot a bit).


Amid the short-term bullishness that the Fed's statement is sure to unleash, there are some potentially disturbing developments when analyzed from a longer term perspective.

First, the Fed is implicitly admitting that it is playing with fire. In other words, by making the ignition of inflation its trigger for reigning in accommodation, the Fed risks igniting a fire of unintended scope and effects.

Second, market participants should remember that the Fed does not control interest rates in the broad economy. The Fed can help keep rates down at the short end of the curve and can even keep rates down to some extent at the long end of the curve in some markets. However, the aggregate bond market is far bigger than the Fed. If inflation rears its head, even modestly, the Fed will be virtually helpless to contain the spike in rates in private credit markets. The effects of such a spike in private credit market rates, in a highly leveraged economy, could ultimately prove far more contractionary than the temporary expansionary effects of its currently proposed stimulus.

Market impact? QE3 was expected. But the Fed's statement was far more aggressive than anticipated by market participants. In the short-term, stocks and ETFs such as (NYSE:ABX), (NYSEARCA:GDX), (NYSEARCA:SPY), (NYSEARCA:DIA) and (NASDAQ:QQQ) should rally.

Source: Fed Gets Aggressive: Willing To Risk Some Inflation