Sweating In The Doctor’s Waiting Room

My palms are clammy, heart-rate is elevated, and sweat has begun to drip down my brow. There I sit with my hands clenched in the doctor’s office waiting room. I’m trying to mentally prepare for the inevitable poking, prodding, and personal invasion, which will likely involve numerous compromising cavity searches from head to toe. The fun usually doesn’t end until a finale of needle piercing vaccinations and blood tests are completed.

Every year I go through the same mental fatigue war, battling every fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Will the doctor find a new ailment? How many shots will I have to get? Am I going to die?! Ultimately it never turns out as badly as I expect and I come out each and every doctor’s appointment saying, “Well, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.”

Investors have been nervously sitting in the waiting room of the Federal Reserve for the last nine years (2006), which marks the last time the Fed increased the interest rate target for the Federal Funds rate. In arguably the slowest economic recovery since World War II, pundits, commentators, bloggers, strategists, and economists have been speculating about the timing of the Fed’s first rate hike of this economic cycle.  Like anxious patients, investors have fretted about the reversal of our country’s unprecedented zero interest rate monetary policy (ZIRP).

Despite dealing with the most communicative Federal Reserve in a few generations signaling its every thought and concern, uncertainty somehow continues to creep into investors’ psyches and reign supreme. We witnessed this same volatility occur between 2012-2014 when Ben Bernanke and the Fed decided to phase out the $4.5 trillion quantitative easing (QE) bond buying program. At the time, many people felt the financial markets were being artificially propped up by the money printing feds, and once QE ended, expectations were for exploding interest rates and the stock market/economy to fall like a house of cards. As we all know, that prediction turned out to be the furthest from the truth. In fact, quite the opposite occurred. Investors took their medicine (halting of QE) and the market proceeded to move upwards by about +40% from the initial “taper tantrum” (talks of QE ending in spring of 2012) until the actual QE completion in October 2014.