Fed keeps jacking rates, because God forbid that workers keep doing well.

So the Fed acted as expected today, raising the Fed Funds rate by 75 points. But that wasn't what people were looking for. Instead, they were looking for hints as to how many more rate hikes were left to come, and how high the Fed Funds rate would go.

Originally, the outlook seemed to be pretty good, as Fed Chair Jerome Powell finally seemed to be looking ahead to current and future conditions to guide policy, and admitted that jacking the Fed Funds rate to 4% was a big deal in itself.

The Fed again raises its main policy rate by 75bps, lifting fed funds to 3.75-4%. "Ongoing increases" will be appropriate to get rates to a "sufficiently restrictive" level, but the future pace will reflect the "cumulative tightening" delivered so far this year and policy lags pic.twitter.com/5uAfKbDp3X

— Colby Smith (@colbyLsmith) November 2, 2022

The stock market jumped, seeing a leveling off of rate hikes coming in the near future, with the DOW Jones Industrial Average exceeding 33,000 at one point. And then Powell spoke to reporters after the Fed's decision was made.

The 3 takeaways from Powell's press conference:

1) The Fed could step down to a slower pace in Dec even if inflation data don't improve much
2) If there had been new estimates of the terminal funds rate released today, they would have moved up
3) Not ready to talk about a pause

— Nick Timiraos (@NickTimiraos) November 2, 2022

And the result on Wall Street....

This is so dumb. Inflation was at a 2% annual rate in Q3 2022, and there is strong evidence of slowdowns in construction activity and housing prices starting to fall. So why keep on tightening at such a heavy pace?

It's rare to see the Fed speaking this clearly about how it works, but here the president of the Kansas City branch says Americans have too much money and that's a problem the Fed's going to solve. https://t.co/s9rG1TvEn9 pic.twitter.com/nM3NZ99xKZ

— Jon Schwarz, Mayor, Arkham MA (@schwarz) November 2, 2022

Yeah, we can't have everyday Americans continuing to have money in their pocket and the country having more than 10 million job openings. That's terrible! We need to restore balance and allow the corporations that are making record profits have a better position to negotiate with the plebes!

Disastrous. A Trump appointee who Biden kept onboard is set on wrecking Biden’s jobs record and maybe giving us a horrible recession. https://t.co/nKNxx5eMJp

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) November 3, 2022

It is infuriating. And it really tells you what the banksters fear most - workers with options. They'd rather wreck the economy than have everyday Americans actually gain ground on oligarchs like them.