The Fed's Emergency Meeting Power Sits Outside Its Published Calendar

The Federal Reserve's eight annual FOMC meetings are the scheduled cadence. But the Committee can call unscheduled emergency sessions outside this calendar — a power traders often overlook. Market participants who treat the published eight-meeting schedule as a hard boundary for Fed action do so at their own risk. March 2020 demonstrated this: the Fed executed rate cuts by phone vote between meetings. Most rate hedges and derivatives strategies concentrate around the fixed calendar, leaving exposure to surprise intermeeting moves.