You folks are funny. My motto is to trust no one when it comes to predicting the future. Everyone is playing their game. The Fed and others with "inflation is transitory" when it was obvious to me that it was anything but given the monetary and fiscal stimulus. Or Wall Street bond traders who are playing their book.
Each of us has to make our own path. try to preserve capital, and move on down the road.
Looking at inflation, we've had a big rush up (starting with commodity prices and supply issues with various goods due to COVID shutdown), followed by a pull back/slow down in growth in economic activity (consumer purchasing) due to higher orices, followed by increases in costs in services as inflation spread through the economy (from commodities to goods to services). A pull back in inflation growth due to a commidity price pullback (which has ended), and now....what.....
One school of thought is that inflation is on the road to being beaten, price growth will return quickly to a reasonable level (e.g. the 2% Fed target).
Another school of thought is that inflation is not even close to being beaten, that there is still a lot of excess money and rates aren't nearly high enough to reduce demand (as could be seen by the jump in real estate activity when mortgage rates fell for a bit - they are now moving back up), and that as China continues to reopen commodity prices will again rise pushing inflation rates back up.
Or maybe neither of the above will happen, instead we will just muddle through for a while with rates somewhere in this range, with the economy stalling but not collapsing.
Who really knows. My investment theme remains the same. Capture good rates on the short end, occasionally buy something longer if it catches my eye, but be very careful at increased risk investments (e.g. bonds of companies or industries under stress), be cautious about allocating a lot of additional capital to equities until what appears to me declining earnings growth looks like it is behind us.
