The US Dollar (via DXY Index) has slipped to fresh weekly lows and what would be a fresh low close for 2018, should it fail to rebound the remainder of Wednesday. Market participants are rightly overlooking US President Trump’s first State of the Union address as, in recent history, it’s been rare to see any legislative follow through on the vision the president lays out (at least as far as this analyst remembers that being the case under Obama, Bush, or Clinton).

Instead, attention is rightly tuned to the first Federal Reserve policy meeting of 2018 today. Nevertheless, it doesn’t look like the US Dollar will be bothered one way or the other by the FOMC meeting, for several reasons.

For starters, the Fed prefers to make major policy changes at meetings in which they have a new Summary of Economic Projections and a press conference for their central bank head to hand-hold market participants. In this sense, the Fed is no different than the BOE (making changes at meetings with new Quarterly Inflation Reports) or the ECB (at meetings with new Staff Economic Projections).

There’s another dimension to today’s FOMC meeting that limits the potential for a significant turn in the US Dollar: it is Janet Yellen’s last meeting as Fed Chair. Should she have been reappointed? Given that every Fed Chair has been reappointed over the past 39 years, and that she oversaw a successful tenure – inflation is stable at or below +2%, the unemployment rate is at cycle lows, credit risk is low, and equity markets are at all-time highs – there is a strong argument to made that she should still be at the helm.

But I digress. The reality is that Jerome Powell will be taking over the leadership next week, with a new panel of FOMC voters being introduced as well. Accordingly, market participants may not take today’s policy statement too seriously: after all, many of its authors will no longer be pulling the policy levers the next time the FOMC convenes in March (and that FOMC composition should be more hawkish).