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Fed in a pickle: Fight inflation OR fuel a banking crisis?

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meets next week on Tuesday and Wednesday, March 21‒22. A week ago, investors were fretting over whether the FOMC might speed up its rate hikes. Now, some are saying the FOMC might cut rates. What’s changed in such a short time? Things are breaking, that’s what.

Mixed messages. Messy markets.

We had some pretty wild data releases over the past few weeks. From November through December, retail sales declined each month, and so did manufacturing activity. Then, we had a bit of a recovery in January. Nonfarm payroll growth was astonishingly high throughout that whole three-month period. How can investors make sense out of the mixed macroeconomic messages?

2023 Multi-Asset Outlook: Positioning Portfolios for Tomorrow

In the third episode of Allspring’s 2023 outlook series, Brian Jacobsen, senior investment strategist, and Matthias Scheiber, head of Systematic Edge Multi-Asset for Allspring Global Investments, discuss the five dimensions to purposefully refining portfolio construction after a year when traditional balanced portfolios got battered.

Tapering Toward a Pause

For some Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings, the result seems obvious ahead of time to just about everyone. This was one of them. When the result is obvious, the market shouldn’t react much because there’s little room for a surprise to push prices around. But this time, the market did react. Why? It’s simple: The FOMC is splintering into factions, and that makes the outcomes from future meetings much less obvious.