This is what it would take to see a repeat of the past decade’s extraordinary stock-market returns (from AQR)…

U.S. equities recently completed a majestic 10-year run, with the S&P 500 outperforming cash by 11.9% per year between July 1, 2013 and June 30, 2023. To be sure, the ride was not always smooth. The market realized sizable drawdowns in 2015, 2018, 2020, and, most recently, in 2022 when elevated inflation and aggressive monetary

The Federal Reserve reportedly has “no plans” to extend its emergency bank lending program when it expires in March (from MarketWatch)…

The Federal Reserve has no plans to extend an emergency loan program it launched last year to bolster the capacity of the banking system in the wake of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. The Bank Term Funding Program will expire on March 11 as it reaches its original one-year time limit, Fed Vice Chair

In the meantime, banks have reportedly been gaming the BTFP program for profit (from The Wall Street Journal)…

An emergency lending program the Federal Reserve created during the 2023 banking crisis has turned into easy money. Borrowing from the Fed’s bank term funding program has increased to new highs in recent weeks, a strange consequence of the market’s flip to forecasting multiple Fed rate cuts over the coming 12 months. The rate banks

Here’s another reason inflation could prove “stickier” than the consensus currently expects (from E-piphany)…

[The] system is normalizing after COVID (and more relevantly, after the spastic and dramatic fiscal and monetary response to COVID). But normal is no longer sub-2%. Core services ex-shelter (so-called “supercore”) abstracts both from the deceleration in housing and the sharp drop in core goods, and it is hooking higher (this is partly because Health