The challenging macro economic environment we find ourselves in is the elephant in the room that has to be addressed before we can dive into our regular programming of discussing stock buyback activity. The higher than expected CPI numbers released on Tuesday and especially the persistently high core CPI numbers shook the markets and triggered a huge decline in most indices. I wrote the following about the CPI print on Twitter on Tuesday.
Institutions paid heed to the strong warning signal that Fed Chair Jay Powell provided last month and purchased protection. I wrote about it in more detail in our last monthly special situations newsletter as well as in the following tweet last week.