The Real March Madness — Mar 16, 2026
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The Fed starts its two-day meeting, Jensen Huang takes the stage in San Jose, and the NCAA bracket dropped last night. Not every Monday earns the name.
Mar 16, 2026
Manufacturing Tipped Back Into Contraction — on the Morning the FOMC Convenes
The Empire State Manufacturing Index came in at −0.2 in March, missing the consensus estimate of +3.9 and snapping two months of modest expansion. Shipments declined even as new orders barely crept up, while prices paid held near historically elevated levels — manufacturers squeezed from both directions at once. The Fed begins its two-day meeting today, and a negative manufacturing print on day one is not exactly the "soft landing" script.
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of New York — Empire State Manufacturing Survey, March 2026
Wall Street's Average Price Target for Nvidia — The Stock Closed Friday at About $180
Thirty-eight analysts cover Nvidia with an average price target of $273 — roughly 50% above where NVDA closed Friday — one of the widest analyst-to-market gaps of any mega-cap stock right now. Jensen Huang takes the stage at San Jose's SAP Center this morning for GTC 2026, where he's promised "chips the world has never seen before," with 30,000 attendees from 190 countries. Fortune called GTC "the real March Madness" this week, which lands a little differently now that the actual bracket also dropped last night.
Source: Bloomberg / NVIDIA GTC 2026
What March Madness Costs the Economy in Lost Productivity — Every Single Year
The bracket dropped last night, which means somewhere between now and April 6th, an estimated $20 billion in workplace productivity will quietly exit the economy — full-time workers average 2.4 hours per workday following tournament games. A new survey of 3,000+ workers found that 38% have already used AI to fill out their brackets, which may be the most economically efficient AI deployment of the year. The odds of a perfect bracket are 1 in 9.2 quintillion — and yet millions will try anyway, mostly on company time.
Source: Plus500 / Action Network Survey, March 2026
BofA Drew a Policy-Response Line in the Sand — the S&P Closed Friday About 30 Points Above It
Bank of America chief investment strategist Michael Hartnett said last week that a drop below 6,600 in the S&P 500 would trigger a "war/oil/Fed/tariff policy response to short-circuit Main St risks" — the index closed Friday at 6,632, a gap of about 0.5%. The FOMC starts today, the Empire State print came in negative this morning, and the index has shed roughly 4.7% from its January all-time high. That's a lot of catalysts for one Monday.
Source: Bank of America / CNBC
Jerome Powell Has Two Press Conferences Left as Fed Chair — Wednesday Is the First
Powell's term as Federal Reserve Chair expires May 23, leaving exactly two post-FOMC press conferences on the calendar — Wednesday's and the one following the May 6–7 meeting. Kevin Warsh remains the frontrunner to replace him, and markets are already trying to price in a philosophically different Fed. His job at Wednesday's podium: say as little as possible, as carefully as he can — which, to his credit, he's gotten quite good at.
Source: Federal Reserve Board