• Fed Governor Lael Brainard and San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly spoke Tuesday, emphasizing the central bank’s commitment to fighting inflation through higher interest rates.
• «It is of paramount importance to get inflation down», Brainard said.
• Raising rates «is what is necessary to ensure that again, [you] go to bed at night, you’re not worrying about whether prices will be higher, considerably higher tomorrow», Daly added.

There is nothing much to add except that the Fed has implicitly aknowledged that they stand behind the curve and that they have to catch up. This is not a good news for high PE’s stocks. The stock market declined following these comments led by the Nasdaq. The Nasdaq composite index hasn’t been able to surpass the 4'500 mark we mentionned several times in our previous comments and this resistance is certainly going to be difficult to surpass. For once, we observed some selling pressure as measured by our buying/selling index. Breadth closed on a weak note on the NYSE: 830 stocks advanced compared to 3530 that settled down. Options traders increased slightly their allocation to puts.