The Ironwood Recap – Market Update – March 18, 2026

With the Iran conflict in focus, the market seems to be focusing primarily on the impact of oil prices on inflation, and what that will do to interest rates.  As headlines about the difficulty in getting oil through the strait of Hormuz are all over the news, the Federal reserve had to make both a decision on interest rates as well as a prediction of where those rates will be in the future.  They concluded the March meeting today with no changes to the headline interest rate.  As for the prediction, even though Chair Powell said that there is so much uncertainty that the dot plot is more or less useless, it showed only one rate cut in 2026, down from the likelihood of 2 as shown at the December meeting.  While it may be viewed as more or less useless to the Fed, that didn’t stop the market from reacting negatively to the lessening chance of more rate cuts.
 
Hopefully the Iran conflict will conclude soon and the disruption to oil shipping will cease.  In the meantime, it is more of a nuisance than the headlines would have you believe.  I have seen the words, “oil crisis” used several times.  Right now, we have a spike in gas prices to levels we saw not too long ago when we didn’t have a crisis, and gas is readily available in the US.  There aren’t long lines as there were in the 1970’s.  It certainly doesn’t feel like oil is a crisis at the moment.
 
If the market continues this downturn we will be looking for bargains and likely shift more money towards stocks.  At the moment though, the downturn is still less than 10%.  For reference, the dip in early 2025 was 15% to over 20% depending on the index, so what is happening right now is currently not a large move.