Powell Said Inflation Isn't Coming Down as Much as "Hoped," the Market Dropped 750 Points, February PPI Came in Scorching, and the Fed Chair Says He's Not Leaving Until the DOJ Investigation Is Over
S&P fell 1.36% to 6,625. Dow -750 pts. Fed held, dot plot still shows one cut. Powell: "not as much progress as hoped." Feb PPI +0.7%. Brent hit $109. DXY back above 100. Gold crashed 3%.
📊 THE MARKET BREAKDOWN
Satirical daily market intelligence for traders who think in systems, not headlines.
Issue #199 | March 18, 2026
🔥 Headlines & Hysteria (powered by Forked Feed)
Forked Feed says: The Fed held. Everyone knew the Fed would hold. The dot plot still shows one cut in 2026. Everyone knew it would show one cut. The inflation forecast was revised up to 2.7% from 2.5%. Everyone expected that. And yet the market fell 750 points on the Dow because Powell, in his second-to-last press conference as Chair, committed the unforgivable sin of being honest. “Not as much progress as we had hoped” is the central banking equivalent of your doctor saying “well, we were hoping the tumor would shrink, but.” It’s technically neutral. It lands like a gut punch. The S&P fell 1.36% to 6,625. The Nasdaq dropped 1.46%. The Russell lost 1.64%. Over 75% of issues declined. Seven of 19 FOMC members now signal zero cuts in 2026, up from six in December, which means the “no cuts” caucus is growing at the exact speed you’d expect when oil is at $100 and the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge is running above 3%. Stephen Miran dissented in favor of a cut, making him the lone voice on the committee willing to publicly disagree with inaction during a war-driven oil shock, which is either principled dissent or career suicide depending on whether Trump’s DOJ is keeping score. Claudia Sahm, the economist who invented the recession indicator that bears her name, suggested on X that the Fed should have just skipped the economic projections entirely because “we just don’t know,” and Powell essentially agreed, telling reporters “if we were ever going to skip an SEP, this would be a good one.” When the Fed Chair says his own projections are pointless, you should probably believe him, and also you should probably sell.
Forked Feed says: February PPI: +0.7% monthly. Headline YoY: 3.4%. Core YoY: 3.9%. This data covers February, which means it captures the pre-war period plus roughly two days of post-war chaos. The actual oil shock, the $119 spike, the $100 Brent, the 46% monthly oil surge, the Strait closure, all of that is in the March data that won’t print until next month. So 3.9% core wholesale inflation is the before picture. The after picture arrives in April, and every economist who looks at the pipeline math involving $100 oil, closed shipping lanes, and fertilizer shortages is currently composing their “this is going to be ugly” research note with the grim enthusiasm of a coroner filling out a particularly interesting death certificate. The market sold off before the Fed even announced because the PPI landed at 8:30 AM and spent the next five and a half hours reminding everyone that inflation was already reaccelerating before the war made it catastrophically worse. Powell confirmed this at 2:30 PM by saying inflation progress was “not as much as hoped.” The PPI told the market the patient was sick. Powell told the market the doctor noticed.
Forked Feed says: Powell dropped the most consequential non-monetary-policy statement in Fed history during a press conference about monetary policy. He said he’s staying. Not just “I’ll serve until my term ends.” He said he won’t leave until the DOJ investigation into the Fed’s building renovation is “well and truly over.” A judge already tossed the subpoenas, agreeing they were a pretext to pressure the Fed on rates. Pirro vowed to appeal. Senator Tillis said he’d block Warsh’s confirmation until the Powell matter is settled. So now: Powell stays past May. Warsh can’t get confirmed. Trump’s handpicked successor is stuck in a Senate committee. The Fed Chair the president wanted gone just declared himself immovable. And the market, which had been pricing a Warsh-led rate cut bonanza starting in June, just discovered that the guy who says “not as much progress as hoped” is going to be saying it for a lot longer than anyone expected. This is the monetary policy equivalent of a CEO announcing during an earnings call that he’s not retiring after all, the board can’t replace him, and the person they hired as his replacement is stuck in HR. The institutional chaos is now a feature, not a bug. Powell essentially dared Trump to fire him, which Trump can’t legally do, from a podium in front of the entire financial world, while simultaneously delivering the most hawkish hold in the Fed’s recent history. That is a power move. It is also the kind of power move that causes markets to drop 750 points because certainty just left the building and took the dot plot’s credibility with it.
Forked Feed says: Brent hit $109 intraday Wednesday. WTI traded near $100. Iran warned that Gulf energy producers are “legitimate targets” after Israel attacked one of Iran’s largest gas fields, and Gulf operators started evacuating facilities, which is the oil market equivalent of the fire alarm going off in a building that was already on fire. The IEA’s 400 million barrel emergency release? Being consumed while the war escalates. Goldman’s 12-day reserve estimate started March 11. We’re on day seven. Five days of reserves remain. By March 22-23, the emergency stockpile is gone and the strait is still closed and the new supreme leader is still saying it stays closed and Iran is now explicitly targeting the energy infrastructure of its own neighbors. The $93 oil that Monday’s “tankers got through” rally celebrated is now a fond memory, like the time you thought the war was “very complete, pretty much” and the market went up 400 points on a phone call. Brent is up roughly 50% since the war started. Every day the strait stays closed, the IEA reserves deplete by another 15 million barrels or so. When those reserves are exhausted and Gulf producers are evacuating their facilities because Iran called them “legitimate targets,” the only thing standing between the market and $150 oil is Saudi spare capacity and the approximately zero ceasefire negotiations currently underway.
🔎 Today’s Focus: The Hopeless Optimist’s Last Stand
Powell hoped inflation would come down. It didn’t. The market hoped Powell would sound dovish. He didn’t. Monday and Tuesday hoped the war was deescalating. It isn’t. Wednesday killed hope with a PPI print, a press conference, and a $109 Brent spike, and hope didn’t even get a funeral because the market was too busy selling to attend.
Forked Feed says: The two-day rally is dead. It lasted exactly 48 hours, joining the March 4 rally (14 hours), the March 9 rally (1 trading day), and the collected “very complete, pretty much” bounces in the growing cemetery of false bottoms this war has produced. The S&P is back at 6,625, below Friday’s 6,632 low, making a new closing low for 2026 for the second time in five trading days. The pattern is now ironclad: rally on hope, sell on reality, and reality keeps winning because reality has $109 oil, 3.9% core PPI, a Fed that admits it’s not making progress, a Chair who just declared himself permanent, and a supreme leader who has made the strait closure his signature policy. The market isn’t pricing risk anymore. It’s pricing the absence of any plausible catalyst for improvement. The war has no end date. The Fed has no room to cut. The oil reserves are depleting. The PPI is accelerating. The Chair is staying. And the president’s response to all of this is to demand rate cuts on Truth Social while his DOJ investigates the man who won’t deliver them. This isn’t an economy. It’s a Rube Goldberg machine designed to produce stagflation, and every component is working exactly as designed.
⚡ The Setup
SPY 661.43 | BTC 71,042.00 | US10Y 4.281 | DXY 100.118
SPY at 661.43 with the S&P at 6,625, a new closing low for 2026, which means every dip-buyer since January 1 is now underwater, a distinction that earns you nothing except the right to stare at a portfolio screen and whisper “it’ll come back” with the conviction of a man who named his fantasy football team “Undefeated” in Week 12 after going 2-10. Support at 6,600, then 6,500. Wells Fargo’s 6,000 worst case is now 5.7% away, which means it’s gone from “tail risk” to “one bad week.” The VIX jumped to 25.09, reversing four days of compression in a single session because volatility doesn’t care about your two-day winning streak, it cares about $109 Brent and a Fed Chair who just said he’s not making progress on the thing he’s supposed to be making progress on. The MOVE index at 81.25 says bonds are having a terrible time too.
BTC at $71,042.00, pulling back from Monday’s $75,237 high as the risk-off from the FOMC spread into crypto. Bitcoin is still outperforming the S&P by roughly 8% since the war started, but Wednesday’s 4% decline from the weekly high suggests that the “digital gold” thesis has a limit, and that limit is apparently a Fed Chair saying inflation isn’t cooperating while oil is at $100. ETH at $2,193. BTC dominance 58.81%. The crypto market sold off alongside everything else, which means the decorrelation thesis from last week just got a ding in its fender, though not a fatal one. The question is whether Thursday’s BTC price holds $70,000 or whether the FOMC hangover pushes it back toward $68,000.
The 10-year yield at 4.281%, up from 4.20% on Tuesday, because when the Fed says inflation isn’t improving and the PPI comes in at 3.9% core, the bond market does the math and decides that 4.20% was not compensating for the risk of owning a 10-year asset in a world where wholesale prices are rising at nearly 4% annually and the central bank just admitted it can’t stop them. Mortgage rates are heading toward 6.25%, which means the housing market is paying a war premium on top of an inflation premium on top of a “the Fed Chair won’t leave” premium, which is three premiums more than most first-time homebuyers can afford. The 60/40 portfolio had another day of both components falling, continuing its transformation from “balanced allocation” to “balanced losses,” a rebranding that no wealth management firm will put in their quarterly letter but every client will notice.
DXY crossed back above 100 to 100.118 as the hawkish FOMC drove dollar demand. The dollar above 100 is a wrecking ball for every emerging market that borrows in USD and earns in local currency, and it’s the market’s way of saying “the Fed isn’t cutting, the war isn’t ending, and the only safe place is the currency of the country that started the war.” Gold crashed 3% to $4,849, its worst day since the war started, because the dollar surge made the shiny metal expensive for everyone who doesn’t get paid in greenbacks. Silver dropped to $76.37. This is the first meaningful gold breakdown of the crisis and it happened on Fed day, which means the market has decided that a hawkish Fed + strong dollar is a bigger negative for gold than an active war is a positive for it. WTI at $99.99 from the screenshot, which is either the universe trolling us with round numbers or the oil market having a sense of humor about the fact that triple-digit crude is now the default, not the exception. Brent hit $109. Gulf producers are evacuating facilities. And the IEA reserves have approximately five days left.
LCG Market Stress Dashboard
We built something free and we think you’ll use it every day.
The LCG Market Stress Dashboard is live at marketstress.texaswestcapital.com. Eleven real-time gauges covering equity markets, Bitcoin, energy, precious metals, tech, bonds and rates, financials, real estate, agriculture, dollar strength, and emerging markets. Each one aggregates volatility, sentiment, and structural signals into a single score — updated daily, readable in under three seconds.
No paywall. No signup. Each gauge is individually embeddable, so if you run a blog or a Substack and you want a live stress meter on your page, grab the iframe code directly from the widget.
This is the same underlying signal framework we use in our trading work at TexasWest Capital, surfaced as a free public tool. Bookmark the dashboard. Embed the widgets. And if you want to understand what the signals are actually telling you, you know where to find us.
marketstress.texaswestcapital.com
🏛 Market Archetype: The Verdict
The FOMC was supposed to be the circuit breaker. It was supposed to either confirm the bull case (dovish language, two cuts, “transitory” vibes) or confirm the bear case (hawkish language, zero cuts, hike signal). Instead it delivered The Verdict: guilty on all counts, with a sentence that satisfies nobody. One cut still in the median, but seven members want zero. Inflation forecast raised but not enough to signal panic. Growth forecast actually raised, which seems delusional when the economy lost 92,000 jobs and oil is at $100. And the Chair just told the world he’s not leaving, which introduces a new variable nobody was pricing: the Fed’s leadership transition is now indefinitely delayed, and the person in charge is the same person who just said he’s disappointed in his own results. The Verdict is the archetype where the jury comes back and the answer is “it’s complicated,” which is the worst possible outcome for a market that needed clarity and got a press conference full of “too soon to know” and “we don’t know what the effects will be” and “if we were ever going to skip the projections, this would be a good one.” When the judge tells you the projections are meaningless but publishes them anyway, you are in a courtroom that has lost the plot.
💧 Flow Pulse
Wednesday’s flows were a four-layer sell-off: PPI at 8:30 AM sold the open, the Fed at 2 PM sold the afternoon, Powell’s press conference at 2:30 sold the close, and $109 Brent sold everything in between. Over 75.5% of issues declined. Every major index fell over 1%. The Russell 2000 and the Dow were the worst at -1.64% and -1.63%, which is the kind of symmetry between small caps and blue chips that only appears when the selling is genuinely indiscriminate, like a fire that doesn’t care whether you’re a boutique SaaS company or a 130-year-old industrial conglomerate.
Energy rose again because of course it did. It’s the only sector that treats $109 Brent as a bonus rather than a crisis. Liberty Energy is up 70% in 2026. The XLE hit its 15th+ record. Airlines gave back Tuesday’s panic-booking gains because the market realized that booking flights before fares go up doesn’t help the airline if jet fuel goes up faster. Macy’s beat earnings and nobody cared.
Forked Feed says: The flow pattern on Wednesday was a tutorial in cascading disappointment. The PPI hit first and the market said “okay, that’s bad, but the Fed will thread the needle.” The Fed hit second and the market said “okay, they held and one cut is still there, but Powell’s about to talk.” Powell talked and the market said “he just admitted he’s not making progress and also he’s not leaving and also the projections are pointless and also $109 oil.” Each layer stripped another excuse from the bull case like an onion being peeled by a sadist. By 4 PM the market had run out of layers, and out of excuses, and out of anyone willing to buy at 6,625, which is 6.7% below the all-time high and 2 weeks into a war that has now wiped out the entire 2026 gain and then some. Powell refused to say “stagflation.” He said it was a “1970s term” and that “unemployment was in double figures” during that era. He’s right that this isn’t the 1970s. In the 1970s, the Fed Chair wasn’t being subpoenaed by his own government while the president demanded rate cuts during a war the president started. So it’s worse. It’s the 1970s with a Twitter account and a grand jury.
🔮 Forked Forecast
Bull Case (15%): The market is oversold. The S&P at 6,625 represents a 6.7% drawdown that may be sufficient to price in the war, the oil shock, and the hawkish Fed. Powell’s “one cut still in the median” is quietly dovish relative to the macro backdrop. Oil pulls back from $109 as the IEA reserves circulate and Gulf producers partially restart. The war deescalates over the weekend. The S&P bounces from oversold levels toward 6,750. This requires multiple things going right simultaneously, which has happened exactly zero times in the last 19 days.
Base Case (35%): The war grinds on. Oil trades $95-$110. The FOMC’s “wait and see” posture means no catalyst from monetary policy until June at the earliest. The Powell-stays-on development delays the Warsh transition and removes the “dovish new Chair” catalyst. The S&P trades 6,500-6,700. PPI reacceleration feeds into the March CPI, which will capture the oil shock and print grotesquely. The “no cuts in 2026” probability pushes above 50%. The market enters a stagflationary grind with no policy rescue visible.
Bear Case (50%): The IEA reserves deplete by March 22-23. Gulf producers evacuate facilities after Iran’s “legitimate targets” warning and the strait stays closed indefinitely. Oil breaks $120. Powell’s “not as much progress as hoped” becomes “no progress” by the June meeting. The -92K jobs print was the start, not a one-off. The S&P breaks 6,500 and the 1970s OPEC crisis parallel, where the S&P fell 40%, becomes the roadmap. The Powell-stays-on drama turns into a genuine institutional crisis if the DOJ appeal succeeds and the Senate blocks Warsh. The private credit crisis (BlackRock, JPMorgan markdowns) accelerates as $100+ oil crushes margins across leveraged portfolios.
Triggers to Watch:
IEA reserve depletion (~March 22-23): Goldman’s 12-day clock is on day 7. Five days of reserves remain. When they’re gone, there’s no backstop.
Gulf producer evacuations: Iran called them “legitimate targets.” Any attack on Saudi, UAE, or Kuwaiti facilities is a $120+ oil event.
Oil $110+: Brent hit $109 today. Every dollar above $100 compounds the inflation shock and shrinks the probability of any Fed cut.
Powell’s term/DOJ appeal: Pirro is appealing the subpoena dismissal. If the appeal succeeds, the institutional crisis deepens. If Tillis blocks Warsh, Powell stays indefinitely.
March CPI (next month): Will capture the full oil shock. Estimated at 0.9%+ monthly. If it prints above 1%, the Fed faces a genuine crisis.
Micron earnings (after close today): AI demand signal. A beat could temporarily stabilize semis. A miss on this tape is devastating.
Iran escalation: Attacking Gulf energy infrastructure is a new level. Any Saudi facility strike changes everything.
Consumer spending: Gas at $4+, PPI at 3.9%, and “not as much progress as hoped” from the Fed is not a recipe for consumer confidence.
📖 Available Now!
Before You Blow Up is a psychological reset for traders who already know the mechanics, but feel decision quality slipping when markets get loud.
This isn’t about new strategies, indicators, or setups. It’s about recognizing the moment risk starts lying to you, conviction turns artificial, and small mistakes begin stacking into real damage. Most traders don’t fail all at once. They drift, tilt, overtrade, and slowly bleed confidence away. This book exists to interrupt that process early.
Inside, you’ll learn how to spot psychological failure before it shows up in your PnL, reset your risk framework when noise overwhelms signal, and protect focus during drawdowns instead of compounding them. The goal is simple: trade less, think clearer, and stay solvent long enough for your edge to matter.
This plan also includes access to a private space tied directly to the book. I’ll occasionally add updates, clarifications, or extensions when market conditions materially change or when something needs to be said. No schedule. No noise. Only signal.
If you’ve ever felt one bad stretch turning into something bigger, this was written for you.
💬 Final Thought
“Not as much progress as we had hoped.”
Seven words. 750 Dow points. A new closing low for 2026. And the most honest thing Jerome Powell has said in a press conference in two years.
He also said he’s not leaving. He said the projections were borderline pointless. He said it’s “too soon to know” what the war does to the economy. He refused to say “stagflation” but described all of its symptoms with the careful precision of a doctor who knows the diagnosis but doesn’t want to alarm the patient. The patient, in this case, being 330 million Americans paying $4 for gas while the Fed Chair tells them he’s “making some progress” on inflation “but not as much as hoped.”
The PPI said 3.9% core. Brent said $109. The dot plot said one cut, maybe. Seven members said zero cuts. Miran dissented for a cut and stood alone. Powell said he’s staying until the DOJ investigation is over. The DOJ is appealing. The Senate is blocking Warsh. The president wants rate cuts. The data wants rate hikes. And the Fed is frozen in the middle, publishing projections its own Chair says are meaningless, while the oil market does whatever it wants and the war enters its third week with no end in sight.
Issue #199. The S&P is at 6,625. Oil is at $100. The Fed is stuck. The Chair is staying. The reserves are depleting. The war is escalating. And the best the most powerful economic institution on Earth could offer today was: “not as much progress as we had hoped.”
Neither are we, Jerome. Neither are we.
-- Forked Feed
Forked Feed is a satirical financial newsletter and should not be construed as investment advice. We're just here to point out the absurdity. Past performance of our snark does not guarantee future sarcasm.
🔗 Stay Connected
Twitter: @txwestcapital
Twitter: @theforkedfeed
YouTube: TexasWestCapital
Website: TheForkedFeed.com and ForkedFeed.ai (coming soon)