Introduction: We’ve noted in the past that many market participants are eagerly waiting for the “Fed pivot”; the time when they expect the Federal Reserve will reassure investors that it’s done raising rates and can get back to more of the fun zero-interest rate combined with trillions of dollars of quantitative easing. Of course that … Read more
Introduction: Tuesday evening, futures markets traded down on news that Apple was seeing lower than expected demand for the new iPhone. On Wednesday, the markets rallied with the S&P 500 up 2.0% and the NASDAQ up 2.1%. The reason was the Bank of England announced they would buy long-dated UK treasury securities. The BoE made … Read more
As “expected” the Federal Reserve raised the fed funds rate by another 75 basis points (.75%) today. We put “expected” in quotation marks because when we started writing about inflation ten months ago, the big Wall Street firms thought we’d get a total of 75 basis points of rate hikes for all of 2022. We … Read more
The August Consumer Price Index (CPI) just came in at 8.3% (prices up .1% from last month). Market watchers were expecting a CPI of 8.1% and prices down .1% from July. Whether the report showed 8.1% or 8.3%, it’s a huge number. To give you a sense of how bad 8% inflation is, at that … Read more
Hi All, I’ll be presenting on a panel at this week’s S&P Global Conference called “The Future of Regulatory Compliance”. We’ll be talking about regulations for cryptocurrencies. My fellow panelists work for large firms and want the US to have a regulatory framework so their firms know what they can and can’t do. They also … Read more