It’s been a busy week across global markets and, so far, Q2 has shown a different backdrop from what had showed during Q1. The central point of the matter is rate expectations around the Fed. Even during the hiking cycle, the FOMC had already started to forecast rate cuts for this year. So, even as inflation remained strong and the Fed thought that they’d need to continue to hike, they were already telling markets that they were expecting to cut in 2024. That’s one of the factors that helped to drive stocks into the end of last year, driven by the hope that the Fed would move into a cutting cycle at some point in ... (full story)