Things have escalated a little this morning as Nasdaq is now testing the lows of the day, as investors de-risk on the heels of Blinken’s ‘Russia threat’ rhetoric and Bullard’s ‘rate-hikes and asset sales’ ranting.
Russia is establishing a pretext to invade Ukraine, according to comments by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the UN Security Council.
“This could be a violent event that Russia will bring on Ukraine, or an outrageous accusation that Russia will level against the Ukrainian government.
“Russia may describe this event as ethnic cleansing or a genocide making a mockery of a concept that we in this chamber did not take lightly,” he added.
“We believe these targets include Russia’s capital (or) Ukraine’s capital Kiev, a city of 2.8 million people,” he said.
Bullard said that Core PCE – The Fed’s favorite inflation measure – “does not have the reputation of coming down naturally.”
“So we’re way on one side of the ship and I think we have to re-center. I want to re-center faster than some of my colleagues,” Bullard said.
“I think there is actually widespread agreement across financial markets” that the Fed should “get going,” Bullard said.
Bullard said he wants the Fed to start to shrink its $9 trillion balance sheet in the second quarter, adding that the Fed should have a “plan B” to sell some of the longer-term bonds from its portfolio to push longer-term interest rates higher.
This move has taken the Dow into the red for the week and the S&P to unchanged…
And at the same time, safe-havens are bid with yields falling on longer-dated bonds and gold pushing back above $1900 for the first time since June 2021…
At the same time, bitcoin has been hit hard very recently as gold jumped – but both are higher as geopolitical pressure rises…
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/gold-tops-1900-stocks-slump-bullard-and-blinken-double-whammy-fuels-fear
