Brian Stewart, our fearless director of news at Seeking Alpha. Welcome back to Wall Street

Breakfast. Great to have you on. Thanks. Great to be on again. Here we are. The last show of

2024, we'll say we're heading into holiday season.

We're heading into the new year. Lots of quiet. Hopefully everybody is doing something that makes them feel content towards the end of the year and the beginning of a new one.

We had some news this week that also taps into that energy of seeing what 2024 was all about

and also giving a sense of what 2025 is about.

Perhaps for those that have guessed already, I'm talking about the Fed meeting and what they

warned us or highlighted for what may be coming, what likely is coming, less rate cuts in

2025. How are you, maybe give us kind of the highlights of that meeting and how you're

digesting it as a news guy? Yeah. So the big news this week, like you're saying, is the Fed

announcement. And it wasn't so much what they did or said in the particular announcement. It's more kind of the projections for

2025. So they cut rates by like quarter point, which was widely expected by the time that the

decision came around. But their view for 2025 was seen as much more hawkish than the market

had kind of predicted. The Fed upgraded its

inflation expectations for 2025 and 26 and also reduced the number of projected cuts

that they would do next year. This brings up kind of the worst case scenario fear for the market,

which is stagflation, kind of going back to

that situation in the 1970s and 1980s where you had elevated inflation and a stagnant economy,

so you're kind of getting the worst of both worlds. And the market, the way things are now,

I mean, inflation is just over 3% on the core CPI. It's got interest rates

right now just above 4%. So it's not exactly the dark days of the late 70s. So we're not really

going back to disco divas and leisure suits just yet. But there is a fear of kind of a mini

...