The inflation story took a turn for the better on Thursday when the government reported that the consumer price index fell 0.1% from a month earlier.

Ever so subtly, the high interest rates of the past year have started to separate the viable businesses from the ones sustained by cheap money.

Wall Street’s stock market soothsayers weren’t entirely wrong about 2022. In fact, S&P 500 Index earnings are on pace to match the consensus forecasts that analysts submitted about a year ago. Stock prices, however, are another story.

The battle against inflation is far from over, but markets can’t be blamed for rushing to judgment after an unequivocally positive consumer price index report Tuesday.

The corporate debt market is still doing its part to keep America out of a recession.

The US housing market is in an uneasy state of equilibrium.

If the last few weeks are any guide, the coveted soft landing for the economy may be coming into view.

Federal Reserve policymakers believe that inflation expectations are self-fulfilling prophecies, and they’re dead set on preventing them from moving materially higher.

The nation’s inflation problem is far from solved, and the Federal Reserve remains committed to keeping short-term interest rates elevated. But longer-term government bonds may finally be worth a second look after some 14 months of carnage.

For much of the past year, interest rate doves have been eager to make excuses for inflation, blaming obscure methodological quirks in the US’s consumer price index for a stretch of concerning reports.

The latest bear-market rally in US stocks has brought investors off the sidelines and provided a welcome reprieve from three quarters of gloom. But traders now need to ask themselves whether the risks continue to justify the potential returns.

Overall, Wall Street has made only modest downward adjustments to earnings outlooks this year. For all the recession hysteria, consensus earnings forecasts for 2023 are a meager 2% below where they started the year.

The US corporate earnings season could prove to be half decent, but don’t expect the market to celebrate.

The credit-market bears may well be vindicated if the US enters a recession in the next year, but it’s too early to go full-scale Armageddon with predictions about corporate bond spreads.

Would you rather buy a risk-free long-term Treasury bond yielding more than 3.5% or take your chances in the stock market? The jury is apparently still out among investors...

Wall Street analysts have trimmed their overly optimistic earnings estimates slightly in recent months, but they’re still nowhere close to acknowledging the threat of a recession.

Peak bond-issuance week is in the books, and high-grade corporate bond deals are hanging tough in the face of recession fears and surging risk-free rates, a trend that appears to be extending into the second week of September.

Americans have driven up their credit balances at a record pace this year.

First, seniors are clearly struggling from the rapid increase in prices. About half of older Americans said they had to spend emergency savings in the past 12 months...

Corporate junk bonds in the US are paying investors a paltry premium for the risk of holding them into a looming recession.

Summer was supposed to be a period of relative inactivity in markets, and it seemed as though A-Team traders were free to go about their vacation plans without fear of missing out on significant developments.

Federal Reserve policy makers don’t have an explicit target for US stocks or consumer borrowing costs, but they know something’s off when they see it, and there’s a chance that now is one of those times.

Home price appreciation is slowing fast across the country under the weight of higher mortgage rates, with typical property values even falling month-over-month in about a fifth of major metro areas in July.

The tight labor market probably didn’t get the US into this inflationary mess, but it is part of the reason that it’s going to be so hard to get out of it.

The latest signs of life from corporate bond issuers sure don’t signal a market that’s in a recession.

Federal Reserve policy makers like to claim they are “data dependent” when it comes to monetary policy decisions, but this month they have run out of consequential economic releases on the calendar to change their minds.

Commodities can make for great trades, but they are often lousy investments.

US corporate bonds are posting one of their worst selloffs since the financial crisis and could deteriorate further if recession predictions prove accurate.

As the latest report showed, predictions of the economy’s imminent demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell sounds as committed as ever to crushing the worst inflation in 40 years. But the economy is shifting under him.

Rarely have market prognosticators disagreed by such a broad margin on the path forward for inflation and the Federal Reserve’s efforts to fight it.

Some 162 companies in the S&P 500 Index received target price reductions Thursday compared with only 62 increases, according to Bloomberg data. The difference marked one of the sharpest swings in analyst sentiment in the 11 years of the series.

The seasonally adjusted median home sale price jumped 3.6% in April from March, the biggest increase in Zillow data dating to 2012. Inventory is starting to rise slightly, but it’s still so low that it’s vastly outstripped by demand, fueling housing appreciation.

The latest US inflation report should be a reality check for Wall Street, but many investors are still wearing rose-colored glasses. Bond yields ticked slightly higher Wednesday after the Labor Department reported that consumer prices rose more than forecast last month, but they are still nowhere near reflecting the monetary policy path it may take to rein in inflation.

The threat of U.S. stagflation has investors treating supermarkets and other consumer staples companies like the high-flying tech stocks of yesteryear. The shares have trounced their consumer discretionary peers by the widest margin in two decades, and the outperformance probably has room to continue.

There are many ways to lose money in down markets, and buying fleeting rebounds is among the best. The Nasdaq Composite Index boomeranged 10% last week from its March 14 low, safety-trade gold posted its worst week since June 2021 and money poured into speculative exchange-traded funds including Cathie Wood’s ARK Innovation ETF.

For all their daily volatility, U.S. stocks have been on a bumpy round trip to nowhere since Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine began three weeks ago. The S&P 500 Index, Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite Index have all been basically flat in the period.

U.S. stocks slumped the most in 17 months on Monday, but the “buy the dip” mentality isn’t dead in the U.S. — and stock analysts are part of the reason it’s likely to stick around awhile. Research on individual stocks is as bullish as it has been in two decades by some measures.

The combination of high U.S. inflation and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has discombobulated U.S. markets. From Friday to Monday, traders effectively reduced the number of expected rate increases by the Federal Reserve to six from seven by next February, even though, by most accounts, the inflation outlook has only worsened.

The crypto job market in the U.S. is mirroring the decentralized ethos of the industry itself -- it’s everywhere.

Just days into the massive effort to vaccinate Americans, the nation’s governors are already parrying competing demands from companies and other interest groups over who will get the next round of doses.

The American pandemic’s most sustained increase in Covid-19 infections appears poised to get even longer, a worrisome indicator for overworked doctors and nurses.