Today I posted my two-hundred-and-forty-eighth YouTube video: The Fed’s Impending Disaster
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Today’s topic is The Fed’s Impending Disaster. The CPI inflation numbers for February looked good from an annual perspective–headline at 6% and core at 5.5%–but if you look month to month, inflation ticked up slightly. In the big picture, inflation is lower, but we’re not seeing it fall at the speed the Fed would hope. The Fed wants to get inflation down to 2% and we’re currently around 5.5% core inflation–a long way off. If you look at those numbers alone, you’d expect the Fed to continue raising their rates. This is what the market was expecting just last week, projecting a 25-50 basis point increase for the March 22 meeting. The thing that puts the Fed between a rock and hard place is the Silicon Valley Bank collapse and additional banking stressors that could lead to more disasters inside the Treasury market. In February the FDIC said that insured banks had about $620 billion in undeclared losses. With $23 trillion in the banking system, $620 billion is less than 10% overall, but if it’s concentrated in certain areas, it could cause more blow-ups. We don’t know if we’ll see any big Wall Street banks go down, like Lehman Brothers back in 2008, but I am watching Credit Suisse closely, especially after the big hit to its share price this morning, March 15. Essentially, the rapid hikes in interest rates have put strains on the banking industry and the Fed will have to decide whether they will continue raising rates to fight inflation, or stop in favor of supporting banks while inflation is still high at 5.5%.
Here’s the link:
