Fed speak The most important news to hit the market was the Federal Reserve’s complete 180 in terms of policy. The central bank that had been waiting and waiting and waiting to change policy in the face of rising and rising and rising inflation decided to announce that they were not only putting on the brakes on their accommodative policy, but actively going to go the other way and tighten policy pretty aggressively next year. Moral of the story: The bank has kept interest rates at effectively 0% and pumped trillions of dollars into the economy since the beginning of the pandemic. They’re basically going to stop pumping cash into the economy in the…

Coming in hot The big report of the week was inflation – CPI, which measures the changes in the cost of a basket of goods – increased 6.8% in November compared to the prior year. This is the highest increase in prices this country has seen since 1982. This print was slightly above expectations of a 6.7% increase in prices. And the inflation was apparent across literally every category. Gas prices are up 58%, food prices are up 6%, car prices are up 31%, apparel up 5%, blah blah. Even though pay increases have increased 4.8% over the same time, obviously not even close to keeping up with the increase…

Ugh. So, we’ve gone back and forth on the jobs status the last few months – first from the delta wave, then the lack of a delta wave, and now November’s report, which was seriously far below expectations. We only added 210k jobs in November, down from the 546k we added in October, and well below expectations for 573k new jobs. Even though we missed on the job creation, we did manage to bring the unemployment rate down to 4.2%, down 0.4% from the prior month. Moral of the story: At this point, we’ve recovered all but 3.6m jobs that were lost during the pandemic. A lot of companies also…