Now that elections are mostly behind us (except for a handful of races) we can move onto the worryings of the consumer price index (CPI).
Tomorrow we have the CPI announcement at 7:30 a.m. (central) and consensus is for a reading of 7.9% as compared to the last reading of 8.2%. The core rate is forecast at 6.5% versus the last reading of 6.6%. NOW is the time when the Fed is gathering ‘data’ for their December FOMC meeting—gathering info to either reduce the rate of increases in interest rates or keep it at 75 basis points. We have tomorrows CPI reading as well as the November reading of CPI and 1 additional employment report before the December meeting, which occurs on December 13 and 14.
Today we have no economic news of consequence–although there will be lots of chatter around the elections–but generally it could be a relatively quiet day in equities and the bond market.
I see Meta (Facebook) has announced 11,000 folks are being laid off–it has been a long time since I remember tech firms laying off large numbers of folks. Of course Twitter laid off half their folks last week (before trying to hire some back). Not certain this is meaningful to the overall economy, but certainly the layoffs are high profile.
Bitcoin is down to $17,xxx as there is turmoil of sorts with liquidity–I obviously don’t follow this closely as I would never own something like this–I still don’t understand block chain and don’t plan to take the time to try to understand it–I’ll leave it to the smarter people. But like many things one has to keep an eye on a trillion dollar asset (which was previously $3 trillion)because it is large enough to have consequences.
Another day and it is unlikely I will buy anything today–maybe Friday will be a nibble day. With low cash levels there is no use stepping further into the fray until after the CPI tomorrow.
