Central banks are in the process of saying “Not so fast!” to markets, and markets are getting the message. Stocks are falling again amid renewed inflation warnings from policymakers.
Gold, silver, and crude oil are all lower along with Treasuries on the news. The dollar is a bit higher.
On the news front…
The Bank of England decided to shake the monetary policy world up a bit this morning, hiking interest rates by 50 basis points rather than the 25 bps that was expected. The move pushes the UK benchmark rate to 5%, a level not seen since April 2008. The central bank in Norway also decided to go 50.
Meanwhile, in testimony before the House yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell said the US central bank has “a long way to go” in its fight against inflation. That’s code for “Yes, we’re going to hike again at the July meeting unless something changes drastically. Probably in September, too.”
That said, we continue to get data that suggests the US labor market is coming off the boil. Initial jobless claims filings came in at a higher-than-expected 264,000 in the most recent week. These are the highest readings since October 2021, even as the unemployment rate overall remains low.
Finally, in one of the odder developments I’ve covered during my time at MoneyShow, Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk and Meta Platforms (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, exchanged challenges to a cage match on social media earlier today.
No word yet on when and where the two billionaire tech CEOs might decide to take their rivalry to the next level. But if we go purely by stock performance, TSLA is beating up on META. The former is up 140% YTD, compared with “just” 126% for META.
