June 2022

  We just had a 3/4% rate hike, the biggest hike in 28 years. Will taming inflation ensure a recession? Right now there's a multi-front war going on against inflation. Finally, after a lot of planning and discussion and debate, the troops have finally been engaged in battle. First and foremost, of course we know about the 75 basis point hike. The Fed funds rate is 1.5%. That's just a fancy name for the short-term safe money interest rate and it is the basis on which all other interest rates are built upon. We're however only halfway to the goal of 3% and we were as low as zero after the pandemic. In fact, by 2023, it's going to go up to 3.75%. So, this party's not over yet. This is affecting interest rates all along the yield curve, which is the fancy way of saying mortgage rates are going...

  Inflation, just how bad is it? It seems that just about every headline in every media outlet is talking about inflation and there's as many opinions about inflation as there are headlines. So, I thought I'd go through a quick summary of the various components of inflation with the idea of maybe improving our general understanding. We have this headline number of inflation. The most recent headline was *8.3%, which was slightly lower than the month before, but inflation is made up of bits. We've got fuel, we've got food, we've got housing, we've got pretty much everything else. We've got core inflation, which includes housing and everything else and we've got the fuel and food inflation. So this gets a little fun. Oil, as we know is $120 a barrel, a little bit over. The average price of a gallon of gasoline throughout the country is $5. Historically,...