How high will the interest rates go?


What is the Fed saying after the first Fed Meeting on December 17? A comment on CNN Business’s “Premarket stocks trading”, by J. J. Powell

CNN Business first published a version of the story. The Bell newsletter was before that. Did you not sign up for a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to the audio version of the newsletter with the same link.

What will the Federal Reserve do at its meeting in December? The Fed said they would use hard economic data to make their next decision.

It’s possible that key housing, labor and inflation reports will have a bigger impact on the market than investors think.

What is happening? No one can sway the markets like the Fed Chair, with just a few words, on Wednesday, when he destroyed investors expectations of an interest rate pivot. Powell said that the Fed had a long way to go in fighting inflation. It’s premature to think about pausing, in my opinion.

Powell added an important caveat. The Fed could slow the pace of hikes as early as December. “Our decisions will depend on the totality of incoming data and their implications for the outlook for economic activity and inflation,” Powell said on Wednesday.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html

Premarket Stocks Trading: The Government Department’s Higher-Spin Rate of Employment and Job Creation in the September-October Workforce Report

The government report is expected to show the economy added another 200,000 positions in October — down from last month, but still a very solid number as demand for employment continues to outpace the supply of labor.

That means more inflation. Businesses have to raise wages to get employees and then charge more for their services. The report will be looked at very closely by the Fed. In September, wages rose by 5% from a year ago.

The December jobs report is expected to be an upside. If the unemployment rate remains historically low, the reports could be enough to get the attention of the Fed.

It was not a good sign for the Fed that core inflation rose 0.6% in September when it had been expected to increase 0.4%. And analysts expect to see another large 0.5% increase in October.

PCE reflects changes in the price of goods and services purchased by US consumers. According to the Fed, the measure accounts for a wider range of buyers, making it more accurate than the consumer price index.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html

What has happened with the Musk CEO at the Bank of England and the First Order Fed Rate Increase in the House-Security Housing Market?

Housing: The housing market has been deeply impacted by the Fed’s efforts to fight inflation, and is one of the first areas of the economy to show signs of cooling.

The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.95% last week, up from 3.09% just a year ago, and elevated borrowing costs are leading to a decline in demand.

“The housing market was very overheated for the couple of years after the pandemic as demand increased and rates were low,” said Powell on Wednesday. “We do understand that that’s really where a very big effect of our policies is.”

The Bank of England raised interest rates by a quarter of a point on Thursday, the largest hike in 33 years, to try to tame soaring inflation.

The bank warned of a dire situation. It said that economic output is already contracting and that it expects a recession to continue through the first half of 2024 “as high energy prices and materially tighter financial conditions weigh on spending.”

The CEO of Musk has been at the office. Aside from tweeting and deleting a conspiracy theory, he’s talked about implementing some big changes at his $44 billion acquisition. Here’s what’s happened so far:

The memo was sent to the staff on Friday morning and stated that the layoffs would begin on Friday. The notice that will inform employees of their employment status is due by Friday.

The email added that “to help ensure the safety” of employees and Twitter’s systems, the company’s offices “will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html

Twitter Blue: What has Musk learnt since his Twitter takeover? An Explicit Response to Musk’s Twitter remark on SpaceX Starlink

The WARN Act requires any company with over 100 employees to give 60 days’ written notice if it intends to cut 50 jobs or more at a “single site of employment.”

Consolidating strength: In less than a week since Musk acquired Twitter, the company’s C-suite appears to have almost entirely cleared out, through a mix of firings and resignations.

The company filing states that all previous members of Twitter’s board, including recently ousted CEO Parag Agrawal and chairman Bret Taylor, are no longer directors “in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement.” According to the filing, Musk is the only one who makes decisions about the company’s direction.

It hasn’t appeared after a month. It hasn’t been brought up by either the creators account or the blue account, neither of which was mentioned by Musk on his initial announcement. I was unable to locate anyone who said they had been making money from the feature. (If you or anyone you know has, please reach out!) As far as I can tell, the sum total of publicly available info on Twitter Blue’s ad revenue sharing is contained within Musk’s tweet about its launch.

In a tweet, the world’s richest man used an expletive to describe his assessment of “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark.” He said that it would be good to have power to the people. For $8 per month, you can get blue.

“SpaceX Starlink bought a tiny – not large – ad package to test effectiveness of Twitter advertising in Australia & Spain,” Musk wrote in a reply to one Twitter user, adding that he did the same on competitors such as Facebook, Instagram and Google.

Musk confirmed on Twitter Monday that his aerospace company, SpaceX, bought a package to advertise its Starlink internet service on Twitter, though he downplayed the size of the ad buy.

This isn’t to say that Blue subscribers haven’t gotten any new features since Musk’s takeover. They can now upload 60-minute videos instead of being limited to 10 minutes, and they can write 4,000-character tweets.

Videos can be uploaded up to 60 minutes in length and have a maximum size of 2MB and resolution of1080p. This feature can only be accessed via the web, and according to the support page, it may have to modify the resolution and bitrate of the video while streaming based on the internet speed and stability of the viewer. Other existing features for Blue subscribers include bookmark folders, a reader interface for long threads, and the ability to briefly “undo” tweets.

Even if you are only interested in social media, he has made an announcement with little to no follow-up before. Remember when he lied about having a content moderation council that would vet any major policy changes at the company — and then tried to sell that same story again but with voting instead of a council? He also said that you’d have to be a Twitter Blue subscriber to vote in policy polls, but we can’t tell if the feature exists due to a lack of follow-up policy polls.