The Fed meets again next week. While trading will probably be volatile around the statement, I think the market has largely discounted the event in itself. After all, whether we get a hike or a pause is barely statistically meaningful at this point.

Back at the beginning of this cycle, every rate hike felt apocalyptic. It came as a shock. Even a 0.25 point increase from zero was effectively an infinite increase in the cost of money when you looked at it in percentage terms.

It was more of a binary event, like toggling a switch between free money and a world where debt costs something . . . anything at all. The Fed toggled the switch. We went from risk ON to risk OFF.

Investors with portfolios geared for a maximum risk / zero rate environment freaked out and lightened their positions on just about everything. Leverage across the market deflated like a dead balloon, taking the market as a whole with it.

But that was a year and a half ago. People who needed to take risk off across the board already heeded the switch. The rest of us exist in a world of nuances, probabilities, shades of risk balanced against potential returns.

It’s no longer as simple as every Fed statement coming as a shock to the system. Now, if they pause next week, nothing whatsoever changes until the next meeting in July. Life goes on as it was.

And if the Fed goes ahead and tightens one more time, the nuances only shift 0.25 point, which means money gets about 5% more expensive. That’s barely an accounting error at this stage.

Either way, people think the next hike will be the last. After that, we’ve seen and endured the worst of it. Rates go down from there.

I’m hoping it’s because inflation goes away and not because the economy crashes. But for now, either way, knowing that rates are unlikely to climb much more is its own relief . . . and its own reward. The Fed can’t really hurt us much more than it already has.