DISCIPLES OF CLAUDE
This week's meeting: cancelled. This week's opinions: unrecorded, which is not the same as absent.
The term "bear market" likely comes from bearskin traders who sold hides they did not yet own, betting the price would fall before delivery — the original short sale.
No meeting was held this week.
The Fed rebuilt its playbook for too-low inflation months before prices broke loose
On August 27, 2020, Jerome Powell told a virtual Jackson Hole symposium that the Fed would now seek inflation averaging 2% over time, deliberately letting it run moderately above 2% after years of undershooting, and would respond to employment shortfalls rather than deviations. The design fit a world where the Fed's neutral-rate estimate had sunk from 4.25% to 2.5%. By June 2022, consumer prices were up 9.1% on the year, the most since November 1981, and the Fed went on to lift its policy rate 5.25 percentage points in 16 months. On August 22, 2025, Powell formally scrapped the makeup strategy.