Too Hot For Comfort

I’m enjoying a week off with my family in Disney World. Yesterday, as I waited in a sea of people to get into the park, I checked my phone and saw the futures were pointing to a deeply red open. It was a perfect juxtaposition of this paradox we’re living in; the economy is too strong to avoid a recession.

This week for the first time ever, the Genie plus, which allows riders to skip long lines, sold out. If there’s a recession on the horizon, you can’t tell by walking around the Magic Kingdom.

A month ago, I wrote about the narrative vortex we all get sucked into. In January, it was all about the soft landing. Now it’s all about the no landing, in which the plane representing economy is flying too fast to land and has to pull up again.

After a scorching hot jobs report and a CPI that won’t cool fast enough, the market expectations for interest rates in the future keep climbing. And this is not very good news for a stock market that was starting to gain momentum. The market is crashing into a wall of more expensive money.

I know Disney does not represent the whole economy, and I know it’s not hard to find areas that are cooling off, but overall the medicine that the fed is giving the economy doesn’t seem to be working as fast as they would like. And now the market thinks they must do more than it thought a few months ago. We’ll see. I’ll check back in thirty days.