Headed into Jerome Powell’s speaking engagement on Thursday, some market observers (myself among them) suggested he’d do well to signal a bit of trepidation regarding the cross-asset rally witnessed in the aftermath of the November FOMC meeting.

Of course, no one expected Powell to explicitly reprimand traders or mention the S&P 500. Rather, some Fed watchers suggested he might simply reiterate the message from his remarks at an October event hosted by The Economic Club of New York. That message: Policy isn’t too tight, the economy is, by appearances anyway, just fine and there’s no reason to believe that any sort of dovish course correction will be necessary anytime soon.

You could quite plausibly argue that Powell’s message as delivered during last week’s press conference wasn’t materially different from his remarks two weeks prior, if it was any different at all. But that misses the point: Whatever Powell meant to convey last week, the market took the totality of his comments as tacit confirmation that rate hikes are over. The message was amplified by a run of soft data punctuated by a cooler-than-expected headline jobs print.

Stocks surged, bond yields tumbled (helped by smaller-than-expected increases to coupon issuance in the November refunding announcement) and financial conditions eased materially, effectively negating a meaningful portion of the FCI tightening Powell and his colleagues spent the better part of five weeks suggesting might stand in for the final rate hike. That’s the Fed’s FCI reflexivity trap.

Suffice to say the FCI tightening brought about by the term premium repricing and attendant long-end selloff since August threatens to be ephemeral, the opposite of the “persistent” impulse Powell insisted the Fed would need to see in order for market-based financial conditions to be relevant for monetary policy.

At Thursday’s IMF event, Powell delivered a boilerplate address that broke little new ground, where that means none. Inflation, he said, has “given us a few head fakes.” The Committee is aware of, and attentive to, the risks of being “misled” by the incoming data and also to the risks of over-tightening. The process of restoring price stability has “a long way to go,” Powell emphasized.

Although the Fed intends to proceed with caution, they won’t hesitate to hike again, according to Powell, who said that although “the broader supply recovery continues, it is not clear how much more will be achieved by additional supply-side improvements.” Looking ahead, it’s eminently possible that “a greater share of the progress in reducing inflation will have to come from tight monetary policy restraining the growth of aggregate demand.”

If there was a market-moving line in Powell’s prepared remarks, it was probably just his reiteration that the Fed’s not yet prepared to suggest publicly that policy settings are adequately tight to achieve price stability as central banks arbitrarily define it.

“The FOMC is committed to achieving a stance of monetary policy that is sufficiently restrictive to bring inflation down to 2% over time,” Powell said. “We are not confident that we have achieved such a stance.”