On Wednesday, Wall Street ended exactly where it had been before the Fed's statement at the end of its monetary policy committee meeting.

At 8.01pm, when the "unanimous" decision to keep rates unchanged was announced, US indices and T-Bonds seemed to freeze, and remained so for 25 minutes.

We then witnessed a "saloon door" sequence, with the indices gaining +1.5% (on their lows) after the start of Jerome Powell's conference... but at 9.25pm, everything flipped and the S&P500 tumbled from 5.090 to 5.020 to close at -0.3%, and the day's low.

Same scenario for the Nasdaq Composite, down in half an hour from 15,900 to 15,605 (or -0.33%), in the wake of AMD -8.6% (after quarterly results just in line with expectations), Nvidia -3.9%, Microchip and Broadcom -3.5%.

In the most eagerly awaited event of the day, the Fed noted that growth remains "rapid" ("solid pace") and that job creation and consumption remain robust ("at a high level"), while inflation has stopped falling and there have been no further signs of improvement in recent months.

The Fed has also decided to reduce the pace of its quantitative tightening (or 'QT') from $60bn to $25bn per month (compared with an anticipated $30bn), while MBS resales remain unchanged at -$35bn per month.

T-Bonds, which had eased as soon as the markets opened, stagnated at the levels they were at with the official release: the '10-yr' ended at -5 basis points towards 4.635%. The small event at the end of the session was the '2-year', which erased -8 basis points and fell back below the symbolic 5% threshold (to 4.966%).

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