The Federal Reserve strikes a notably dovish tone at its March 2025 FOMC meeting.

What counted as right

Status

resolved

Settled on

2025-03-19

Judged on the 19 March 2025 FOMC outcome, both legs required: (a) the Summary of Economic Projections keeps the median 2025 dot at two or more cuts (no hawkish reduction), and (b) fed funds futures move dovish on the day of the decision, i.e. market-implied odds of a cut by the June 2025 meeting are higher at the 2025-03-19 close than immediately before the announcement. Lee's folded-in sub-claim that 'markets are going to price in a May cut' is treated as evidence for leg (b), not as a separate scored claim.

Both required legs are supported by primary sources, and they point the same way, so status is resolved. Leg (a) is exact and unarguable: 3.9% median for end-2025 in March 2025, identical to the 3.9% in December 2024, implying about two 25bp cuts retained with no hawkish revision. Leg (b) is directionally unambiguous across every instrument I could observe — the June 2025 fed funds contract's implied rate fell 2.0bp between the immediately-pre-announcement hourly bar and the 4pm ET close, the same contract's day-over-day settle moved dovish, and both the 1-year and 2-year Treasury yields fell on the day. Two honest caveats the scoring stage should see rather than have buried. First, on instrument choice: the June 2025 fed funds contract settles on the AVERAGE effective fed funds rate across June 2025, and a cut at the 17-18 June meeting takes effect 2025-06-19, so it touches only about 12 of 30 days. Scaling the observed 2.0bp fall in the implied monthly average by 30/12 implies roughly a 5bp increase in the expected post-June-meeting rate reduction, on the order of a 20 percentage-point rise in the implied odds of a 25bp cut by June. That scaling is my own arithmetic inference from contract mechanics, not a published probability, and it should be treated as an estimate rather than as sourced evidence. Second, on sourcing limits: the cleaner instrument for 'a cut by the June meeting' is the July 2025 contract (ZQN25), which fully reflects the post-June-meeting rate, but it was not retrievable here — the data source returned no data for ZQN25.CBT, ZQK25.CBT and ZQU25.CBT. Nor could I retrieve a directly published before/after probability snapshot: the CME FedWatch historical view is JavaScript-driven, the Atlanta Fed Market Probability Tracker returned HTTP 403, and this session's web-search budget was exhausted, so no contemporaneous reporting of FedWatch odds was pulled. Net effect: the SIGN of the leg (b) move is well evidenced by exchange and official data; only its precise magnitude in probability terms is un-sourced. I did not flag needs_human_review, because no evidence conflicts and neither leg is genuinely ambiguous — the gap is one of precision, not of direction. Note also that the record's folded-in sub-claim about markets pricing a May cut is, per the criterion, evidence for leg (b) rather than a separately scored claim, and I have not resolved it independently.

Sources

• Fundstrat's Tom Lee Breaks Down 2025: Tailwinds, Inflation Risks, and the Bull Case for Bitcoin

  Fundstrat (YouTube) · 2025-07-23

  Source