Post ZIRP Stock Market and Gold Era

The Federal Reserve finally mustered the courage to end its radical zero-interest-rate-policy experiment this week.  Its quarter-point rate hike announced on the seventh anniversary of ZIRP kicks off the long road to normalization.  This leaves the stock markets and gold in unprecedented uncharted territory.  The Fed has never before attempted to exit ZIRP, let alone in the midst of such extremely distorted markets. The Fed’s ZIRP saga symmetrically ended 7 years to the day after it began way back in mid-December 2008.  That was just after the dark heart of that year’s once-in-a-century stock panic, which struck terror into the Bernanke Fed.  The benchmark S&P 500 broad-market stock index (SPX) had plummeted 30.0% in a single month in October, and then plunged another 11.4% from those brutal lows in the subsequent month.

First published here: Post ZIRP Stock Market and Gold Era