The coffee has gone cold in three cups this early morning, what do you think the Fed answered?

Last night's interest rate meeting is likely to prompt another round of complaints from the night watchmen—Powell's eternally unchanged face still bears four big characters: "Wait and see." Interest rates? Stagnant. The table is filled with hawkish rhetoric, but those in the know have long sensed a different vibe.

The focus lies in the details: the pace of the balance sheet reduction has suddenly come to a halt.

How was it done before? Selling off $95 billion in treasury bonds and MBS every month, the money in the market became tighter and tighter. And now? Directly cut in half, down to the range of $40 to $50 billion. What this operation boils down to is—on the surface, holding steady, but secretly starting to add water to the pool. Once liquidity loosens up, risk assets immediately sniff out the opportunity. Has Bitcoin been rising joyfully lately? Is Ethereum secretly pleased? Is the tech sector in the US stock market also getting a boost? The answers are all written in the K-line.

In the short term, this wave of invisible easing has ignited market sentiment, and funds are starting to flow into high-risk areas.

But don't celebrate too early. Powell himself has admitted that although inflation has decreased, it is still a step away from the 2% target. More troublesome is that Trump is about to return to the White House, and that pile of tariffs could be thrown out at any time—if import costs rise, will inflation come back? Will the Fed hold firm or back down? No one can say for sure. Even more provocative, Trump has publicly nicknamed Powell "Mr. Late" suggesting he wants to force him out early. Whether the Fed chair can hold his position until 2025 is itself a huge question mark, and the market could experience a rollercoaster ride due to this uncertainty at any moment.

To sum it up: This meeting seems fierce on the surface, but is actually timid. The short-term market has already gained momentum, and in the medium term we still need to keep a close eye on inflation data and the movements from the White House. Everyone, fasten your seatbelts; 2025 is highly unlikely to be boring.