Welp, it happened What a wild way to wake up Thursday morning to the news that Russia had invaded Ukraine. I’m sure everyone’s aware of the horrors happening on the ground, but here’s a little history lesson on why this is happening if you need a refresher. First things first, if you’re looking for a way to personally help, I donated to the UN’s Ukraine Humanitarian Fund that’s part of the UN’s crisis relief program – you can donate here. Secondly, the reaction in the market to the actual invasion was pretty crazy. Stocks started the day on Thursday down sharply but somehow reversed all losses of the day to end the day in the…

It’s not going away Bear with me, we’re going to talk about inflation again. The latest data on inflation came through this week in the form of the producer price index – basically this report tells us how much more (or less) producers are having to pay for their inputs, which gives us a good idea of how they’re going to change what they charge us for the goods they produce. This index increased 9.7% for January compared to the prior year, down slightly from the prior month but still way too high for comfort. Despite the rise in prices, regional manufacturing reports from New York and Philadelphia this week indicated…

Have you heard, this thing called inflation There were a couple big pieces of information that moved markets this week. The first was the January number for inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. Inflation came in at a hot 7.5% overall, and 6% on a “core” basis, which excludes food and energy. This read on increasing prices was worse than expected and marks the sharpest annual increase in prices since February 1982. Moral of the story: The market is expecting more and more aggressive action from the central bank to curtail the impact of inflation by raising interest rates. Higher interest rates = lower present values for future earnings…

State of the economy The manufacturing and services sectors of the US economy grew for the 20th consecutive month in January, but not without the lack of headwinds, pulling down the rate of growth across the board. Manufacturers continued to experience a lack of labor (especially in the middle of the Omicron wave) and parts is causing backlogs to increase and prices to increase even faster. Moral of the story: Supply chain issues continue to be topical for companies that actually produce good, and it doesn’t seem like this is going away anytime soon. There are indications that at least the labor side is starting to get better but we’re still…