Prospector News Publisher, Michael Fox isa joined by the Publisher of the National Investor Chris Temple to talk about the latest quarter point interest rate rise by the US Fed. We discuss the rate hike and the markets seemingly shrugging it off as if what the Fed is saying “Higher for Longer” is not a thing.

Chris discusses the Five reasons for this:

• The Fed did not expect at this juncture to be dealing with an economy still growing a fair bit.
• Core inflation—and services inflation especially—have likely stopped declining
• The jobs market is still quite strong, with unemployment rates still near multi-decade lows
• …and with that, dreaded (to the Fed, anyhow) wage growth.
• Lastly—though Fed Chair Fire Marshall Jay recently (that recent banker confab in Portugal) opined in answer to a question that he wasn’t necessarily going to be “targeting” stock prices—it can’t make anyone at the Fed happy that the continued resilience on Wall Street is likewise also screwing up their mission, with the renewed speculative fervor and the (in the end, I still think, unsustainable) boost to the wealth effect and, thus, added consumption and pushing up of prices that the Fed doesn’t want.

Finally, we discuss the very short market tantrum on Thursday that wasn’t related to the Fed but by decisions by the Bank of Japan to change the target interest rates on Gov’t bonds.

The National Investor