Central Bank Rates and the Unexpected Rise in Inflationary Rates: Why Should Central Banks Stop Hitting Their Magic 8 Balls?

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When will central banks stop raising interest rates? That’s the multi-trillion dollar question that has Wall Street analysts wearing wrist braces from shaking their Magic 8 Balls so hard.

The Federal Reserve will meet on Tuesday and Wednesday to make a policy decision. Fed Chair Jerome Powell will address reporters directly after the decision is announced at 2 p.m. ET on Wednesday. The rate decision from the Bank of England will be announced on Thursday.

For some time, it was thought that 2023 would bring lower interest rates and a return to dovish monetary policy. But a mountain of mixed data is clouding that outlook. Now, some analysts think that central banks will take less of a flash-fry approach to policy decisions and instead opt for sustained, smaller hikes over a longer period.

Across the globe, central bankers have shifted overnight borrowing rates higher in the hopes that they can cool the economy and temper rampant inflation by making it more expensive to borrow money. The impact has been lackluster so far.

The Eurozone’s annual rate of inflation hit a record 9.9% in September, up from 9.1% in August. A flash estimate shows inflation increased to 10.7% in October.

The “unexpected and extraordinary” rise in inflation surprised policymakers, ECB President Christine Lagarde told reporters on Thursday. She said that increases in retail energy prices could push inflation even higher in the medium term.

The US economy, meanwhile, grew by 2.6% last quarter, which indicates that the economy isn’t softening yet (though there are signs that a slowdown could be coming). New personal consumption expenditures data on Friday, the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation, showed America is still contending with elevated prices. Europe is growing as well.

“It is unlikely that we have seen the full effects on households and businesses of the latest rate increases we have implemented, and it would not be appropriate to continue moving rates up until inflation is back down to 2 percent.” She said, “Because of the Fed communication, financial conditions began to tighten well before the first rate increase in March, and those effects have been passing through to the economy.” Yet high inflation persists, an indication that we need to increase rates further.”

The lag in data makes the central bankers unsure if they have done enough. If they ease up on rate hikes too soon, they risk inflation becoming further entrenched in the global economy. They risk sinking their countries into a recession if they over-correct.

A possible answer: Wall Street tends to favor big events, but the future of central bank policy may be more nuanced. To kill T.S. Elliot. The tightening will end in a whimper and not a bang.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/31/investing/premarket-trading-stocks/index.html

A Controversy: Elon Musk’s Tweet concerning Covid-19, Prime Minister Trudeau, and the U.S. Prime Minister

After spending months attempting to get out of his deal to buy Twitter

            (TWTR), Elon Musk officially owns the hugely influential platform, reports my colleague Clare Duffy.

According to safety experts, there could be a big shift for content moderation under Musk’s ownership.

An owner with an erratic and controversial history on the platform: Musk has a mixed reputation in the tech industry. He is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious and successful innovators and entrepreneurs of this era. But he has also courted controversy, often from his own Twitter profile, where he has more than 100 million followers.

Over the years, he has tweeted misleading claims about Covid-19 and made a baseless accusation that a man who helped rescue children from a cave in Thailand was a sexual predator. He has also commented on the performance of Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau and compared him to Joseph Stalin.

He gave credence to the conspiracy theory by linking to an article that was full of baseless claims. After he deleted the tweet, he continued to go for retweets and likes.

Is House of the Dragon Coming to an End? Rethinking Your Twitter Relationship with the State of the Art and the Science of the Future

The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia is an important one. It has been one of the more awkward lately, according to my colleague Matt.

Angry officials in Washington vowed “consequences” after Saudi-led OPEC sharply cut oil production earlier this month, driving up pump prices just weeks before the midterm elections.

US legislators threaten to ban weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and use the Justice Department to file a lawsuit against the country if they do not do something about it.

If this relationship breaks up, there could be enormous ramifications for the world economy and international security.

This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with WIRED platforms and power reporter Vittoria Elliot about the changes coming to Twitter and how they may affect the future of the social network.

House of the Dragon is a show designed to encourage men who want to father children to watch it. Mike is a big fan of the new album from Natalia Lafourcade. Lauren wants you to rethink your relationship with social media.

Twitter, Gadget Lab and Saudi Arabia: How Donald Trump is treating Saudi Arabia, India, and the rest of the Twitter user base, and how to fight back against it

There is a person called VittoriaElliott on the @telliotter account. The person is Lauren Goode. Calore is a fighter. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The producer of the show isBoone Ashworth. Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

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David Kaye, who was the UN special rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression, says that he thinks that the way he treats Saudi Arabia and India is a good indicator of how he is going with the platform.

A relatively small group of people power Twitter. According to internal company research, heavy users who post in English account for less than 10% of monthly users but generate 90 percent of all revenue and 50 percent of global revenue.

Jason Pielemeier, executive director of the Global Network Initiative, says Musk’s goal to build Twitter’s user base to more than a billion people could also affect his willingness to battle it out with foreign governments to keep content on the platform.

In India, Twitter’s third largest market, the company filed a case earlier this year to contest the government’s order to remove individual pieces of content as well as whole accounts that the government considers a risk to India’s security or sovereignty.

Lurking isn’t doomscrolling: Luring on Twitter during the Covid Pandemic, or How to Survive on Twitter

“Tiny talk is talk so small it feels like it’s coming from your own mind,” Musk fired off shortly past 10 pm last Thursday, a thought so deep it might have bubbled up from a fish-bowled dorm room. Congratulations: We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.

In the workplace, quiet quitting is rejecting the burden of going above and beyond, no longer working overtime in a way that enriches your employer but depletes your own metaphorical coffers. On Twitter, it’s about not giving more to a platform than most people can expect to get back. If you want to remain on it, you need to find a way to utilize it without using you.

It is easy for an active user to make a mistake if he thinks his experience is different for everyone than it is for him. It is the same for journalists. Half of the users on the platform say they only write about their lives less than five times a month. They go about their lives when they check in on sports, celebrity news and current events. They are referred to as lurkers.

Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. Choosing to lurk, to sit back and observe for a while, is basically a heuristic and simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter. Open your browser or app and check in on Musk’s new toy. Send a tweet, then disengage. Keep one eye on it during basketball games. Direct the message threads away from you if you have to. Save your most thought provoking ideas for another time.

The teams across Europe have suffered heavy layoffs just like in the US. Staff in Dublin, Ireland’s 1 Cumberland Place office, which used to house around 500 Twitter employees, have been using war terminology to describe the past week’s events. People who remain employees are “survivors,” and colleagues who have been let go are “fallen,” says one person with knowledge of the matter, who asked to remain anonymous. Almost two weeks after Musk took over, employees of the company in Ireland received their first communication from him. They were told that they needed to work from the office 40 hours per week.

There is no centralized list of people who have been fired. Employees use workplace messaging app Slack to see if colleagues are still working. Dublin is not the only European office to be affected by layoffs. Social media posts show that people have been let go in London and Brussels. It’s unclear if employees in Twitter’s other European hubs—Hamburg, Madrid, Utrecht, Paris, Berlin and Manchester—have also been affected.