Stocks Join Inflation Fight That Housing Resists
The Fed still faces an incredible challenge in curbing consumer demand to control rising prices.
The declines in stocks and bonds have wiped about 6% off traditional investment portfolios.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The stock market is finally starting to join the fight against soaring consumer prices. For much of the past two years, the run-ups in stocks and housing prices have made consumers feel rich, and that “wealth effect” has helped fan the highest inflation in 40 years. Consumer demand needs to fall back in line with supply to cool the pace of price increases, and that simply can’t happen if a surfeit of Robinhood millionaires is buoying consumption.
As I wrote last month, the Federal Reserve needs to shock markets into submission, and that has finally started to happen, albeit more through rhetoric than through concrete actions so far. Fed Chair Jerome Powell now says that multiple half-percentage-point interest rate increases may be on the table if necessary — a sequence that the economy hasn’t experienced since the mid-1990s. The roughly 10% decline in the S&P 500 Index since late March shows that the message is finally getting across, but anyone who thinks that the Fed’s work is done is in for more unpleasant surprises.