Brian Stewart

2.6% is sort of in the comfortable range.

I mean, it's still above the 2% Fed target, but the market has sort of gotten used to things in more of the 2.5%, 2.6% range.

So I think it's just in line with the kind of inflation that we've been seeing lately.

So elevated, but not...

um you know panic inducing so the market kind of took that in stride if we if we look kind of bigger picture of the the fed pretty much locked in um at this point that we're going to get no change in april um

market trading is showing a 98% chance that we'll get no change, with a very fractional chance that there'd be higher rates in April.

If you look to the end of the year, there's about a 70% chance of no change.

That includes a 1% chance of higher rates and a 29% of lower rates.

Just to put that in context, about a week ago, so before the ceasefire, before the latest

Inflation data, there was an 80% chance of no change, including a 7% chance of higher rates.

So basically what you're seeing is people starting to believe again in the possibility that sometime during 2026 we're going to lower rates.

It's still a minority kind of position at this point, but it is, you know, a meaningful opportunity.

a meaningful probability now when before there was shadings towards maybe being higher rates later.

So you're seeing the market starting to get kind of a more optimistic view of how things might play out over the rest of

the year, but obviously we're very headline driven.

We've got PPI coming out next week.

See whether that confirms the CPI report.

We have the ongoing conversations in the Middle East, so we'll see how those turn out.

So right now the market's sort of taking things in stride, but there's always headline risk going forward.

The latest jobs data came out last week, came out on the market holiday, so you and I didn't get to talk about it, but it was a pretty good report.