When The Fed Chairman Speaks, Everyone Freaks

(Getty Images/Win McNamee)

For some reporters, the White House Correspondents Dinner is more than just another night at the prom. For CNBC's Maria Bartiromo, it turned out to be a working dinner – one in which she gained a piece of information from a fellow attendee that ended up having quite the effect on markets (as Fed chairmen's remarks so often do). From the Financial Times (via TVNewser):

Stocks fell on Monday after CNBC's Maria Bartiromo revealed on air that Ben Bernanke felt his testimony last week had been "misunderstood."
The anchor said Mr Bernanke had told her at the White House Correspondents' dinner in Washington on Saturday that he had not intended the markets to infer that the Fed was nearly done raising interest rates.
"I asked him whether the markets got it right after his congressional testimony and he said, flatly, no," Ms Bartiromo said. She was reporting live from floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the resulting trading roar almost drowned out the rest of her remarks.

FT procured one market strategist to interpret the situation. Said Alan Ruskin, a strategist at RBC Greenwich Capital: "It comes off as a great example of over-communication and a possible attempt to over-fine-tune, assuming he was willing to go on the record with these comments - CNBC is not the Fed's obvious port of call to correct market expectations."

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