As Bloomberg's Sebastian Boyd writes, it’s hard to overstate the importance of Wednesday’s US inflation report to a market that’s split between two different views of the economy, and the Fed’s plans for dealing with it.

The report is critical because - among other things - two weeks ago, at his July 27 press conference, Powell said the Fed would slow the pace of hikes at some point... but he also made clear that the central bank thinks the labor market remains strong and that is offsetting the slowdown in demand. Friday’s nonfarms payrolls data bore that out in a stunning way, with the US economy creating far more jobs than any of the 71 economists in Bloomberg’s survey expected (granted, the Household survey painted an entirely different picture but we'll cross that bridge in time). For all intents and purposes, the market saw the number as super hawkish, and while Fed funds were pricing in a 36% chance of a 75-bp September hike before payrolls, they’re now looking at a...

Ford Motor Company is the latest automaker to announce a price hike for its electric vehicle (EV) due to "significant material cost increases and other factors." 

The Detroit automaker adjusted the MSRP on the F-150 Lightning for the first time since it was revealed in the spring of 2021. Since then, industrial metal prices for batteries, including nickel, manganese, cobalt, and lithium, have jumped, forcing the automaker to raise the new EV truck prices by up to $7,000, depending on the model. 

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Stocks are rallying on hopes that Jerome Powell and the Fed will stop increasing interest rates this fall, pivot, and start reducing them next year. For fear of missing out on the next great bull run, many investors are blindly buying into this new Powell pivot narrative.

What these investors fail to realize is the Fed has a problem. Inflation is raging, the likes of which the Fed hasn’t dealt with since Jerome Powell earned his law degree from Georgetown University in 1979.  

US equity futures reversed earlier losses and traded modestly in the green in cautious, muted overnight action before US inflation data which is expected to show headline US CPI cooled but stayed elevated in July, and which will shape investor expectations for further Fed rate hikes. S&P 500 contracts climbed 0.2% as of 715am ET, following a fourth day of declines in the underlying index Tuesday after Micron Technology followed Nvidia, and become the latest chipmaker to warn of slowing demand. Nasdaq 100 futures also rose 0.3% as Tesla hilariously gained in pre-market after CEO Elon Musk vowed an unexpected $6.9 billion sale of Tesla stock - his biggest on record - would be his last (which would be at least somewhat credible if he didn't say that after every previous stock sale). Europe’s Stoxx 600 Index erased an initial drop, while the dollar slumped, and 10Y Treasury yields traded flat around 2.79%, while the 2s10s curve remained inverted by a massive 50bps....

By Ven Ram, Bloomberg markets live commentator and reporter

Will the Fed serve up a surprise out-of-policy rate hike? Well, there is certainly a case for the monetary authority to do so. The ebullient jobs-market data for July, coming after those dire-sounding second-quarter gross domestic product numbers, has opened up a window of opportunity for the Fed to act. After being late to start hiking rates, the Fed -- to its credit -- has shown remarkable alacrity to quell inflation and has shown the way for lesser central banks that have behaved like deer caught in headlights by pressing on with more emphatic rate increases.

Even so, the Fed’s upper end of the policy rate at 2.50%, which may mark the neutral rate under equilibrium -- read “ideal” -- conditions, is yet to approach that zip code. And the Fed would do well not to leave that task of getting to 3% to a later day when who knows how the economy will fare. Given the current resilience in the...

Amid sanctions on Russian payments - which had reportedly stalled the flow of oil into Europe via Ukraine's pipelines - a Hungarian refiner has paid the transfer fees enabling the spice oil to flow.

Bloomberg reports that Hungarian refiner Mol says it paid Ukraine a transfer fee to restart crude oil flows from Russia to central and eastern European.

The Ukrainian government is lobbying European Union nations as well as the United States to shut their borders to any and all Russian travelers for a period of at least one year.

"The most important sanctions are to close the borders — because the Russians are taking away someone else’s land," President Volodymyr Zelensky said in Monday comments to The Washington Post. Zelensky went so far as to say there should be a world-wide ban in place by the international community on Russians going anywhere.

By Ven Ram, Bloomberg markets live commentator and reporter

Italy’s CDS curve is likely to flatten and possibly invert if the nation’s right-wing coalition scores the landslide victory that opinion polls predict it will.

Matteo Salvini, leader of the League, has vowed a flat 15% tax on employees, raising eyebrows on what the implications would be for fiscal prudence -- or perhaps the lack of it. Moody’s, which last week altered the credit outlook to negative on the nation’s Baa3 rating, has already remarked that “sluggish growth, higher funding costs and potentially weaker fiscal discipline” may have material credit implications down the line.

A new report published by the Employment Research (IAB) on Tuesday outlines how Germany's economy will lose a whopping 260 billion euros ($265 billion) in added value by the end of the decade due to high energy prices sparked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine which will have severe ramifications on the labor market, according to Reuters. 

IAB said Germany's price-adjusted GDP could be 1.7% lower in 2023, with approximately 240,000 job losses, adding labor market turmoil could last through 2026. It expects the labor market will begin rehealing by 2030 with 60,000 job additions.

The report pointed out the hospitality industry will be one of the biggest losers in the coming downturn that the coronavirus pandemic has already hit. Consumers who have seen their purchasing power collapse due to negative real wage growth as the highest inflation in decades runs rampant through the economy will reduce spending. 

By Irina Slav of OilPrice.com,

Excessively high energy prices in Europe are pushing up the prices of everything that energy is used for, including food—a trend that will likely feed further inflation.

On Feb. 15, the billionaire filed for Chapter 11, personal bankruptcy protection in US Bankruptcy Court in Bridgeport, CT, listing assets of just $3,850 and liabilities between $100 million and $500 million. Guo’s declaration came after a Hong Kong money manager, Pacific Alliance Group, sued him over unpaid debts.

That certainly didn’t add up. Only three months after filing for bankruptcy, Guo had spent nearly $2 million on legal fees. Yet on May 11, he filed a waiver of personal bankruptcy with the court through his lawyer, stating he had no more funds to pay his legal fees.

During the bankruptcy hearing, Guo claimed he owned no house, no car, and no credit cards. That certainly didn’t square up with the lavish lifestyle he flaunted on social media – replete with mansion, private jet and yacht.

So is this story really about bankruptcy? Or a very elaborate ruse?

A careful review of the official transcripts of its eight long hearings shows the committee repeatedly made connections that weren’t there, took events and quotes out of context, exaggerated the violence of the Capitol rioters, and omitted key exculpatory evidence otherwise absolving former President Donald Trump of guilt. While in some cases, it lied by omission, in others, it lied outright. It also made a number of unsubstantiated charges based on the secondhand accounts—hearsay testimony—of a young witness with serious credibility problems.

These weren’t off-the-cuff remarks. Panelists didn’t misspeak. Their statements were tightly scripted and loaded into teleprompters, which they read verbatim.

In other words, the committee deliberately chummed out disinformation to millions of viewers of not just cable TV, but also the Big Three TV networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—which agreed to preempt regular daytime and even primetime programming to air the...

A group of American defense experts operating out of a 5th floor suite in Washington DC have been mapping out a hypothetical war between the United States and China over Taiwan.

Jason and Lorraine Contreras, and their daughter, Penelope, currently have a 14-acre homestead in western North Carolina. They have learned to grow the majority of their own food, raise their own meat, improve the land and soil they live on, and thrive without electronic distractions.

By Ye Xie, Bloomberg markets live commentator and reporter

An unusual discrepancy has showed up in two sets of trade data in China. Depending on which official sources you use, China’s trade surplus, could either be overstated or under-reported by a staggering $166 billion over the past year.

China watchers cannot fully explain the mystery. It’s as if Chinese residents bought a lot of stuff overseas, and instead of shipping the items home, they were kept abroad for some reason.  

Remember way back in April 2013 when Elon Musk vowed at the Tesla annual shareholders meeting that "just as my money was the first in, it will be the last out." No? Good, because fast forwarding to Tuesday night, we learned that Musk just took 6.9 billion steps to be among the first to get the hell out of Dodge.