Lou Whiteman

I mean, we're seeing inflation outpace annual wage growth.

for the first time in three years that actually drove real inflation adjusted hourly earnings down by 0.3% based on this recent readout.

Now, there's been some speculation that this could maybe alter the Fed's playbook, right?

We're seeing fixed income markets are kind of adjusting to this higher for longer rate environment.

You've got some analysts floating the possibility of a rate hike.

But I think ultimately we're seeing a reality where there's this prolonged gap between sticky inflation.

We're seeing low yielding traditional bank accounts means the cash reserves might rapidly lose their purchasing power.

So there are a lot of first and second order impacts on consumers.

And it's something that's not just going to go away, even if the current conflict that we're seeing that's driving some of these price hikes is to abate in the next two, three weeks.

Yeah, I mean, the reverberations are basically across every sector you can think of.

And that's why PPI is so important.

It acts as this very key indicator of inflation.

It tracks price fluctuations before they ever reach consumers.

So you kind of think of it as the early warning system for consumers, right?

Consumer price index tracks what you and I pay at the register.

But the producer price index, or PPI, attracts inflation to the factory floor.

So what businesses are paying for raw materials, like you just mentioned?

Fuel, wholesale supplies, before those products ever reach a store shelf.

And we are seeing astronomical spikes in the cost of energy to run factories, food ingredients for packaging, and just the baseline services required to ship goods.

And so if you're looking at this as an investor,