Hotter-Than-Expected August Inflation Prompts Massive Wall Street Selloff

So . . . . That was a day on Wall Street, amirite? – NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch

For those who somehow missed it, you can thank the slightly-worse-than-expected CPI figures for that market freefall yesterday. Consumer prices rose 8.3% in the year through August (compared to 8.5% in July), and after stripping out food and fuel, consumer prices increased 6.3% in August (up from the 5.9% figure in July and the 6.1% that analysts had expected). All told, that means that the Fed is likely to keep hiking rates, and that was enough to kill the few days of optimism that had given markets a boost starting last week - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg  and Marketplace

Feels like the right time to again check in on a U.S. economy that finds itself squarely in a very “strange place right now” - NYTimes

Amidst all that bad news, a bit of good: new information from the Census Bureau shows that unprecedented government spending on emergency pandemic aid helped drive the U.S. poverty rate down to 7.8% (from 9.8% the year before) in 2021 while also cutting “the number of poor children by nearly half” - NYTimes and WSJ and Marketplace

Twitter whistleblower Peiter Zatko spilled some tea about the inner workings of his former company before a Senate committee yesterday, telling the panel that execs “disregarded concerns about foreign governments infiltrating its operations and misled regulators about its privacy practices” because they were so focused on the “company’s business” - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and Law360

Zatko’s bombs, of course, added more drama to the ongoing dispute between Elon Musk and Twitter over the former’s $44B offer to buy the latter. Twitter shareholders officially approved that ill-fated offer yesterday - WSJ and Law360

Big win for European antitrust authorities this week in their fight to rein in Big Tech. Today, an EU General Court affirmed the record “multibillion-dollar fine issued against Google in 2018” over the company’s practices of using its “Android smartphone technology and its dominance in that market to cement the leadership of its search engine” - NYTimes and WSJ and TechCrunch

Warner Bros. Discovery rolled out more job cuts this week, as the newly combined company works to find the $3 billion in savings that executives promised to find when the merger became official in April - NYTimes

Meanwhile, over at Amazon, the e-commerce giant will “raise  pay and benefits for its delivery partners” as it “gears up for the peak holiday season amid a persistently tight labor market.” Among other things, the $450 million Amazon’s earmarked for the program will fund wage increases, pay for educational programs, and “financial support for a 401(k) investment plan for drivers” - WSJ

Bayfield, WI and Lake Superior as the next great cruising destinations? Don’t strain those ribs laughing. It’s already happening - NYTimes

MDR

The Robins Kaplan Financial Daily Dose features top stories and latest news headlines in financial markets, banking, securities and technology topics.