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2021-12-14 15:06:32 5 things to watch for when the Federal Reserve announces its policy decision Wednesday

A pivot is defined as a turn or a twist. Its safe to say there will be twists and turns on Wednesday as Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is widely expected to adopt a more hawkish stance in his postmeeting news conference Wednesday.

On display will be “the limits of Fed hawkishness,” said David Kelly, chief global strategist at JPMorgan Funds. Central bankers are often described as either inflation-wary hawks, eager to tighten monetary policy, or more growth-focused doves.

“Fed members have displayed their dovish feathers too often at this stage for us to mistake them for a flock of hawks.”

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2021-12-13 17:39:22 A near-term pullback, then the third bubble in 100 years is coming, says strategist.

Of the dozens of central bank meetings crammed into this week, the Federal Reserve is seen stealing the show with a tapering start and possible early rate-hike hints.

After the “worst inflation call in history” and its credibility shattered, Chair Jerome Powell will need to take the reins hard. So we’ll see if a potentially sterner Fed knocks the S&P 500, which glided to a new high on Friday despite nosebleed consumer prices, off the Santa rally path.

Investors should look to history for proof this can happen. The S&P 500 dropped nearly 20% in the third quarter of 1998 before the dot-com bubble burst in 1999-2000. A “late arriving” Fed tightening from the second-half of 1999 to the first half of the next year couldn’t stop it.

It maybe taking the S&P 500 toward the low 4,000s by the first quarter of next year.

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2021-12-12 15:38:20 One country topped GoFundMe’s list of most generous nations for the third year in a row — and it’s not the U.S.

It’s been another year marked by tumult for many around the world, and one country has emerged as a generous supporter of people in need. Ireland topped the list of most generous countries, according to the 2021 giving report from the for-profit fundraising platform GoFundMe.

Donors in Ireland donated the most money per capita on GoFundMe, where individuals can quickly set up fundraising appeals for everything from college tuition to help recovering from disasters. All they need is a photo, a “shareable” story and a verifiable bank account, according to the GoFundMe website.

This year marks the third year in a row that Ireland was the most generous country on GoFundMe’s list. The United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia were the other most generous countries on a per capita basis.

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2021-12-11 18:29:46 Inflation is running rampant in the U.S. — here’s where it is, and isn’t

Gas, trucks, housing and food account for the vast majority of price increases over the past year.

The inflation storm is still battering American families, and there’s no quick end in sight.

Since March, when inflation really began to heat up, the consumer price index (CPI) has risen at an 8% annual rate, the highest in more than 40 years. Over the past two months, prices are up at a 10.8% annual rate.

Everything may be more expensive, but some prices are going up faster than others, and some prices mean more to us than others, because they are a bigger part of our budget.

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2021-12-11 18:23:48 Inflation Plagues American Economy: US Consumer Prices See Fastest Rise in Close to 40 Years

Inflation Accelerates in the United States

Inflation continues to rear its ugly head in America as the cost of goods and services continues to rise with 2021 nearing the year’s end. On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a unit of the United States Department of Labor, published the agency’s consumer price index (CPI) report for November and statistics look awful. Basically, the CPI is a measurement of a basket of goods urban households consume regularly. The metric rose the highest its ever been in close to forty years, jumping 6.8% over the same period in 2020.

The Fed not only got inflation wrong but by extension they got policy completely wrong and you find yourself very much validated here: They’ve totally overdone it on the liquidity front as they kept printing like madmen into an inflationary environment that they denied existed.

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2021-12-10 20:14:18 Crypto Has No Reason to Exist, Says ECB's Fabio Panetta

Fabio Panetta, an executive board member at the European Central Bank, lambasted cryptocurrencies in a lecture published on Dec. 10, arguing that they have no reason to exist: On the whole, it is difficult to see a justification for the existence of crypto-assets in the financial landscape.

Despite the fact that the total value of the cryptocurrency market topped $3 trillion this year, Panetta asserts that cryptocurrencies are not useful either for society or the economy.

In fact, he claims that crypto has a negative impact on society due to the adverse impact of mining on the environment, criminal activities associated with crypto, as well as a lack of regulatory mechanisms for protecting investors.

Now that cryptocurrencies have achieved such high valuations, they pose significant risks to the global financial system, according to the ECB official.

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2021-12-10 16:49:57 Stock Futures Rise Ahead of U.S. Inflation Data — and What else is Happening in the Stock Market Friday

Stocks were inching higher ahead of key inflation data. Markets are now considering when in 2022 the first Federal Reserve interest rate hike will come.

The consumer-price index will hit the wires at 8:30 Friday morning and economists are expecting prices to rise 6.8% year-over-year, which would be higher than the prior reading of 6.2%. A combination of soaring consumer demand this year and supply chains’ inability to meet that demand has caused prices to surge.

Markets have been quick to reflect the chances that an abrupt change in monetary policy could dent economic growth. Short-term Treasury note rates have risen, while long-dated bond yields, which often forecast longer-term economic demand and inflation have fallen. The S&P 500 and Dow are both trading below their all-time highs hit in November.

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2021-12-09 21:43:47 American Airlines to cut international flights due to Boeing Dreamliner delays

American Airlines Group Inc. is planning to trim international flights next summer because of Boeing Co.’s delays in delivering new 787 Dreamliners, according to people familiar with the matter and a draft internal airline memo.

“Without these wide-bodies, we simply won’t be able to fly as much internationally as we had planned next summer, or as we did in summer 2019,” Vasu Raja, American’s chief revenue officer, wrote in the draft internal memo.

A Boeing spokesman said the plane maker deeply regrets “the impact to our customers as we work through the process to resume deliveries of new 787s.” Deliveries are expected to resume by April 1, 2022, at the earliest, later than previously anticipated, according to people familiar with the matter.

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2021-12-09 20:13:51 ‘Proceed with caution’: here’s what Wall Street analysts see for the U.S. stock market in 2022

‘2022 will be a critical year when the imbalances wrought by the global pandemic begin to resolve and the business cycle normalizes from extremes,’ says Morgan Stanley’s Lisa Shalett.

The recent spike in market volatility may herald a bumpier U.S. stock market in 2022, as investors come to grips with an inflection point in monetary policy during the pandemic.

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2021-12-08 20:01:02 America’s new export problem: 12.1 million shipping containers left biggest U.S. ports empty

For 20 years, Greg Jackson has exported hay and grass grown in California’s Imperial Valley to places like China, where an increasing number of dairy farms rely on American alfalfa and other forage crops that are in short supply locally. As the executive vice president for sales at Border Valley Trading in Brawley, Calif., Jackson has arranged for shipping containers to ferry hay from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach across the Pacific Ocean.

But this year, Jackson has found it much more difficult to get American hay loaded into shipping containers bound for Asia. The containers, which arrive at the California ports stuffed with iPhones and other manufactured goods, are increasingly being sent back empty. Jackson estimates that his company, which ships around 8,000 40-foot containers a year, has seen volumes fall by 15% to 20% in recent months as a result of canceled bookings.

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