The Impact of Unexpected FOMC Actions on Corporate Earnings Expectations

Abstract

This paper fills a gap in the literature by examining the impact of unexpected Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) actions on the markets expectations of U.S. corporate earnings by examining the sell-side analysts' quarterly earnings forecasts from 1989 to 2022. This paper reveals a significant negative correlation between analysts' earnings forecasts and unexpected changes in the target interest rate. This correlation weakened after the Federal Reserves implementation of Forward Guidance as a monetary tool in 2004, which appears to enhance the market's ability to predict target rate adjustments. In addition, this paper shows that with a given amount of unexpected target rate changes, value firms display greater earnings forecast revisions from analysts than growth firms. Debt levels or profitability factors cannot fully explain this phenomenon. The findings of this paper contribute to the knowledge of how FOMC actions exert influence on equity valuations and the transmission mechanisms of monetary policies.