 Welcome to FIG's Weekly Economic and Trading Update. I'm Mark Bailey and this is Jessica Rossett. So Mark, all eyes last week were on the Fed meeting where they raised rates, as was expected. However, the dovish tones from Janet Yellen did catch the market off guard. Also, UK Parliament gave Theresa May permission to start with Brexit and we also had some disappointing domestic job data released. What was your take on it all? Yes, if you kind of really whine back to last Friday when we got the non-farm payrolls and the job data there, which was actually stronger than expected, that kind of ticked the final box that was going to hold the Fed back from hiking. In the meantime, we also got the CPI data and the retail sales, which were pretty much in line with expectations. So as you say, the Fed did hike 25 basis points to 0.75% last week. And as a result of that, everybody was looking at the blue dots. And that was what they were expected to focus on because, in all honesty, the hike was priced in. In terms of the blue dots, they actually stayed reasonably similar. There was a slight movement in terms of the consensus into a more concentrated target zone, but they're still only expecting two hikes this year and three next year. And as you rightly pointed out, that surprised the market. The market was expected in a much more hawkish tone and had positioned for that as well. So you actually saw a really, really strong rally in treasuries. For example, 10-year US Treasury yields rallied around about 11 basis points. They fell 11 basis points to, I think it was 2.49. And that was partly due to the fact that the statement was more dovish than expected. So that was pretty interesting. Moving forward into Australia and the job data there, it was slightly weaker than expected and employment did tick up. The jobs creative was actually weaker than expected, but perversal was actually a fairly positive full-time, part-time split. But again, I think it does just put the RBA slightly on the back for it, maybe a bit more defensive in terms of looking to hike rates in 2017. And if I was looking at the RBA's statistics, I would probably be still looking at a cut. Interestingly as well, and something that people aren't really talking about is that the banks are hiking mortgage rates. We've seen this in investor only loans and on some fixed rates. But what we actually saw this week was the NAB raised its standard variable rate for owner occupiers by 7 basis points to 5.32%. If that is continued and the other banks follow suit, then that will mean a higher cost of capital for mortgage holders. The RBA has always said that it will look through in terms of what we're seeing as a cost of capital, and so if that continues, then they're more likely to cut rates as well going forward. So that's what I've been doing this week. Have you been mining the US high-yield sector again this week? Yeah, so as I mentioned last week, the IM Gold buyback of the 2020 dated maturity bond has certainly created a flurry of activity in the US dollar denominated space. So we've managed to secure an institutional bid at the call price of 103 spot 375. And this means that clients are able to exit the bond now at the same price without having to wait until the call date, which is in early April. So clients have taken advantage of the good supply we have had in the Kindred 2023 maturity bond and also the Frontier 2025 maturity bond and been able to lock in the yield on those bonds now rather than having to wait. And so the beauty in doing this is that they have been able to maintain their US dollar exposure and move slightly along the tenor curve to these longer dated maturity, dated bonds and also diversify their portfolio away from commodities and resources and into some other names as well. Also with the Frontier at the moment, it's been coming at a better yield than where we have seen elsewhere just because it had some softer performance, fourth quarter performance data released in early March. So they've been able to get that at a better rate. And Jess, anything happening in the Australian dollar bond sector? Yes. So as you would have seen last week, Fik has added a couple of new tier two floating rate note bonds to its retail product offering. So these bonds were available previously only to wholesale and now retail investors can purchase them as well. So one of them is Emmy Bank 2020 call bond and then the other one is ANZ 2021 call. And so the beauty of these bonds for retail is that there is very little in the investment grade floating rate bond note bonds available for retail investors. And so this is a great opportunity for them to rebalance their portfolio and put an investment grade allocation in there. And they come in quite attractive yields as well for their investment grade rating and it's around the 4% yield on those, yield to call on those. And I think that sounds pretty attractive for investors to diversify, pick up some investment grade rated paper as well at what you'd say is attractive yields as well. Yeah, that's right. So next week we have RBA Minutes released. What other news and events should investors be aware of? So other than the major event on Saturday afternoon in England where England played Ireland and Dublin for the Grand Slam. Of course, yeah. It's actually a pretty light week. As you say, we've got the RBA Minutes but I don't think there'll be a huge amount of additional information there. And also we've got the House Price Index coming out as well in Australia which does play into the RBA's decisions in terms of trying to control a potentially overheating market and whether they do potentially push it back onto APRA and introduce some macro-potential regulation there. But in the States it's a pretty light week as well. You have some home sales data and also some durable goods. But again, it's a reasonably light calendar after what was a pretty hectic week last week. Thanks Jess. Thanks Mark. And thanks for watching. Tin hats on. Enjoy.