Wall Street bounced off session lows and seesawed on Wednesday after the U.S. Federal Reserve released the minutes from its most recent monetary policy meeting, which showed the while the central bank intends to begin raising interest rates to combat inflation, it will make such decisions on a meeting-by-meeting basis.
All three major U.S. stock indexes spent the session in negative territory, with tech shares (.SPLRCT) weighing heaviest, as investors contended with shifting geopolitical tensions and a raft of data suggesting U.S. the economy is heating up, thereby bolstering the Federal Reserve’s case for aggressive rate tightening.
“There a lot of crosswinds going around with Russia-Ukraine tensions, but from a domestic macro environment, the key variable driving equities is whether the Fed will increase (interest) rates by 50 basis points in March,” said Huw Roberts, head of analytics and Quant Insight in London. “The Fed would probably prefer to prepare the market a little bit and one way to do that is a more hawkish set of minutes.
