The Fed delivered on its well-telegraphed plan to raise interest rates as soon as next month in an effort to combat inflation. The central bank has been easing its bond-buying program and appears ready to reduce its balance sheet after a rate hike or two - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch
Despite all the choreography, markets swung to a loss not long after the Fed confirmed its policy plans - NYTimes and Bloomberg
Let’s see how they react to the Commerce Department’s release of GDP data later today. Analysts expect a 1%+ rise in Q4, which, if true, would mark 5.5% GDP growth on an annualized basis—the “largest one-year jump in growth since 1984.” Of course, any variation down from that number will surely send shares diving again - NYTimes and WSJ
Tesla delivered its best-ever yearly profit on Wednesday, as surging sales led to a sixfold increase in profit from a year earlier. Still, the company sought to temper expectations by warning that “supply chain troubles stemming from the pandemic would continue to be a constraint on production through the coming year” - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg
Amazon will pay a relatively paltry $2.25 million to resolve a WA State AG investigation into whether the company engaged in illegal price fixing through its Sold by Amazon program that “guaranteed sellers a minimum price while offering a potential upside if [its pricing algorithm] determined that customers were willing to pay more” - NYTimes
File under “expected but still tough to see in black and white”: Boeing reported a loss of $4.3 billion for 2021 “after a $4.16 billion deficit in the final quarter, following a year when it slowly increased production of new jets but struggled to deliver them” - WSJ
Apple will soon reveal plans to take on Square in the battle for POS dominance through a coming service “that will let small businesses accept payments directly on their iPhones without any extra hardware”—a feature Apple’s been developing since its $100 million acquisition of Mobeewave in 2020 - Bloomberg and Mashable
Recent major drops in the value of digital currencies have prompted the IMF to urge El Salvador to end its grand Bitcoin-as-legal-tender experiment. The Fund warned that the country’s continued embrace of crypto “entails large risks for financial and market integrity, financial stability and consumer protection” - NYTimes
As promised, activist season is underway. So Bill Ackman’s recently announced 3.1 million share stake in Netflix should raise a few eyebrows, even as Ackman and the Pershing Square gang took pains to praise “the company’s business model” - WSJ and MarketWatch and TechCrunch
My boys couldn’t quite pull out a W in this one, but still. The Winter Classic was one to remember, and this deeper look at it from the Wild perspective is excellent - MNWild
Stay safe, and get boosted,
MDR
The Robins Kaplan Financial Daily Dose features top stories and latest news headlines in financial markets, banking, securities and technology topics.
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