There’s nothing like a strong down day on the stock markets to get the easy money crowd to start clamoring for a bailout. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:
But raging inflation is a political bitch, and the White House got the Fed to acknowledge it, and that changes the equation.
Stock markets closed at 1 p.m. today, and there wasn’t enough time to rectify this evil situation that has emerged on Black Friday, when stocks were supposed to be meandering higher on very low volume, driven by a few algos that would make sure stocks meandered higher to easily book another winning day and a new record high for the S&P 500 to keep the hype going.
But the sellers had arrived overnight while the buyers suddenly weren’t super-interested at buying at these ridiculously inflated record prices after the largest and fastest money printing scheme ever. And voilà. What everyone knew would happen someday, happened on this Red Friday, and stocks swooned.
And already the crybabies on Wall Street have come out in force, clamoring for the Fed to end the tapering of its asset purchases, and to push out the expected interest rate hikes into distant infinity, and to maybe even re-start QE all over again before they even ended it, because, you know, stocks aren’t ever allowed to drop, not even a little bit off their ridiculously inflated highs.
But the Fed, unlike before, has bigger worries for the first time in four decades – and Powell and Brainard, along with just about every other Fed governor have acknowledged it: Raging consumer price inflation that has now spread broadly across and deeply into the economy, filtering into services such as rents that are unrelated to transportation mayhem and production shortfalls in Asia. Rents, accounting for about one-third of CPI, are just now getting started to flex their muscles in the inflation indices. And the mood of consumers has soured.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 