I can no longer even remember a time when the US rate hike wasn’t mentioned at least once a day by someone or the other. Analysts spend hours and hours dissecting Fed chair Janet Yellen's every tone and gesture in her speeches and every word in the FOMC minutes.
Some of my banker friends have bet a bottle of extremely expensive whiskey on the Fed’s eventual decision and even the most sceptical of our lot can’t help but turn on the news when Yellen speaks.
As a retired banker, I no longer have to deal with day-to-day market-moving events thankfully. But while I can just sip on my whiskey and watch the drama unfold around me, for those less fortunate it seems almost impossible to escape the Fed.
However, I hear that some have managed to turn a deaf ear to all the noise. One treasurer of an emerging market sovereign recently asked an origination banker friend whether the Fed had raised the rate yet. When my friend replied in the negative, the treasurer asked him, with some relief, to let him know when it did.
This coming from a sovereign treasurer, whose fundraising plans almost certainly depend on the Fed announcement, is a bit strange. But kudos to him for having found a way to tune everything out. Maybe sometimes ignorance is simply bliss.