• The U.S. decided not to test out ICBM capabilities in hopes of avoiding any unintentional escalations with Russia… Probably smart.
• Welcoming the pharmacy revolution.
• The Good Oligarch: Russian billionaire plans to sell Chelsea FC and donate all proceeds to victims of the war.
• It’s a stock picker's market once again. And hedge funds are all-in.
• On Wall Street, interns are bailing on already accepted positions for fresh offers. Recruiters are hating it.
• The FTC and Amazon are (almost) at each other’s throats… again.
• You better put down that shot of Russian Standard. Get some Tito’s for now.
• GM is getting out of town, or Lordstown, to be specific.

Jerome Powe-W — Call-daddy Jerome Powell is officially back in action, or as we like to refer to him on days like yesterday, Jerome Powe-W. All but sealing the deal on market expectations for this month’s rate increases, Powell revealed his support for a 25bps hike.

Rate hikes generally lead to lower stock valuations, but when you’re expecting a hike of 50bps and the damn Chairman of the Fed says, “Nah fam, we’re only raising by half that,” people get excited

And that’s exactly what happened yesterday. In his testimony to the House Financial Services Committee, Powell said, “we expect it will be appropriate to raise the target range for the federal funds rate at our meeting later this month.” Boom.

As if the market wasn’t fawning over that enough, Powell went on to detail plans around balance sheet reduction, saying, “we are going to avoid adding uncertainty to what is already an extraordinarily challenging and uncertain moment.”

Moreover, you’d be a very rich ape if you got a nickel for every time the word “predictable” was tossed around during the meeting. Since that’s the market’s favorite word, indices rallied hard during and after the Chair’s speech.

So, lower-than-expected rate hikes and a push for predictability are great for markets. But if you ask yourself, “why the change of pace?” the answer becomes clear.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was arguably a black swan event, one that led to subsequent surprises like the extent of sanctions issued by the West. With this backdrop, it would’ve been just plain cruel for the Fed to jack up rates all the way to 0.5%.

Enjoy it for now, but be careful. As we’ve learned all too well over the past few years, markets can change at the drop of a hat.

State of the States — I’m sorry but isn’t this header a way better name? Keeps it light, keeps it fun. Exactly what you want when the Head of State gives an update on exactly how fast the country is falling apart, right?

Jokes aside, President Biden delivered another surprisingly coherent speech yesterday, this time in the form of the famed State of the Union address. As expected, much of the speech centered around one Mr. Vladimir Putin.

The key takeaway from that portion of the speech, at least, was Biden and the rest of the NATO leaders’ abilities to act in a unified, coordinated manner in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Luckily the term “nuclear” wasn’t used, so there’s that at least.

Further along in his address, Biden shifted towards domestic policies. The name of the game, as expected, was “oil prices.” Just as we stated earlier this week, pump prices remaining elevated is going to absolutely kill members of the President’s party during midterm seasons later this year.

Joey B did detail the release of 60mn barrels of oil, but again, as we said earlier this week, 60mn barrels really ain’t sh*t. Just look at Brent crude prices. After hitting $110 yesterday, traditional theory would’ve said prices should fall. But as of 5:06 pm yesterday, Brent was up even more to $114.50.

So, we’ll take avoidance of a nuclear war, I guess. But fix those damn gas prices!!!

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