These days no matter what the Federal Reserve actually says, the markets respond like dogs sensing a piece of bacon coming their way. This is so for several reasons:

1) The world is vastly overleveraged, which terrifies investors and traders with even a modest historical perspective. The resulting insecurity makes them long for a higher power willing and able to keep the wolf of instability from the door.

2) The federal government understands that its ability to be all things to all constituents requires steadily increasing asset prices. To this end it has converted the financial markets from mechanisms for the efficient distribution of capital via accurate price discovery, into public policy tools for manipulating finance and politics. So the Fed's job is no longer to maintain a stable playing field on which capitalism can work its magic, but to ensure rising asset prices forever.

To view the markets' happy acceptance of this new reality, we need only look at what stock prices do when the Fed speaks. Here's a CNBC report on the March 2015 Fed meeting:

Thank you, Janet Yellen! Stocks surge after Fed

The Federal Reserve has run out of patience. And Wall Street couldn't be happier.

Stocks surged after the Fed's latest statement was released Wednesday afternoon. The Dow was deep in loss territory and then jumped over 300 points in a matter of minutes. The index ended the day up 227 points and back above 18,000.

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq quickly popped as well. The Nasdaq even briefly surpassed 5,000 again and is not far from its all-time high from March 2000. Here's why.

The Fed didn't do anything unexpected. The market hates surprises.

What it means: But the central bank reassured the market that a rate increase was “unlikely” at its next meeting in April. That is not a surprise either. Wall Street has been betting on rates starting to go up in June or later.

The Fed also issued new forecasts. It lowered its 2015 and 2016 outlook for gross domestic product (GDP) slightly. It also cut its inflation forecasts and predicted that the unemployment rate will fall further than it thought a few months ago.

All this suggests the Fed will take a slow and steady approach to rate hikes. That should calm down investors who had been worrying the Fed would boost rates too quickly.