Jobs Report Friday! Here’s what we’re looking for in the March numbers after reports earlier this week suggested we remain in a period of both high openings and voluntary resignations - Bloomberg and NYTimes and WSJ
Stocks closed lower across the board on Thursday to close out the worst quarter on Wall Street in two years. Still, for you optimists out there, March wrapped as something of a rebound month for stocks—including the S&P 500, which “rose 3.6 percent for the month” and managed to gain “back more than half of its losses from the lowest point of 2022, when it was down 12.5 percent.” The bounce back came “as stock investors realized that their worst fears about the economy hadn’t materialized,” even in the face of persistent inflation, global conflict, and the pandemic - NYTimes and Bloomberg and WSJ and MarketWatch
Speaking of inflation, the latest figures from the Personal Consumption Expenditures Index—a favorite of the Fed—showed prices up 6.4% through February as compared to a year earlier, the “fastest inflation rate since 1982” - NYTimes and WSJ
Not helpful in the Fed’s bid to slow this trend? Rising wages, which “could keep overall inflation brisk as companies try to cover their labor costs, speeding up price increases for services even as they begin to moderate for goods” - NYTimes
As expected based on yesterday’s reporting, the U.S. will indeed tap its Strategic Petroleum Reserve to the tune of up to 180 million barrels over the next 6 months in an effort to fight increasing gas prices that the White House is blaming on Russia’s war with Ukraine - NYTimes and Bloomberg and WSJ and MarketWatch
The UK will join in the effort to help bring down its own domestic gas prices - Bloomberg
Federal authorities are reportedly investigating whether a meeting between Activision’s CEO and traders “days before they placed a large bet on Activision’s shares” violated “insider-trading laws.” The resulting options trade “has generated an unrealized profit of about $59 million” and “was arranged days before Activision agreed to be acquired for $95 a share by Microsoft Corp.” - WSJ
The Times dives deep into the global supply-chain mess with this excellent piece that tracks the fate of a storage container wending its way from a factory in China to a warehouse in the U.S. during the pandemic-tainted 2021 - NYTimes
Updates from the latest effort by Amazon warehouse workers to unionize—this time in Alabama—show supporters “narrowly trailing opponents” by just over 100 votes, with more than 400 challenged votes uncounted as challenged. The results of the revote, which the NLRB ordered late last year, should be out later today. Regardless of the final outcome, the count so far suggest a much closer result than the initial vote “at the same warehouse last year, when workers voted down the union by a more than 2-to-1 ratio” - NYTimes and Bloomberg and WSJ
New SEC guidance out this week intended to “introduce consistency to the way crypto-trading platforms account for their holding of assets like bitcoin on behalf of their customers” would require crypto exchanges to “report their customers’ digital tokens as liabilities on their balance sheets” - WSJ and Bloomberg
The advice we all need for finding the masterpieces buried among the thousands of images in our mobile photo rolls. An important first step: do some careful looking - NewYorker
Stay safe, and have a great weekend,
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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