Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

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What's going on, guys? It is Tuesday, February 7th, and today we are talking about the Fed's hawkish

walkback.

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You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, guys, well, this show felt pretty inevitable after

last week's FOMC meeting. If you're a regular listener, you will have heard me talk about

this pattern of interaction that the Fed has had with markets since at least a year ago when

the tightening cycle began. Basically, the Fed says, hey, we've still got a ways to go in all sorts

of various forms. After a while, the market either gets bored of markets being bad, or susses

out some data point that it uses to convince itself that the Fed's hand is going to be forced

and that a pivot is inevitable.

This has tended to be a bad news is good news thing where the market basically doesn't

believe Powell and co that they'll hike into a recession. Anyway, the rally goes on for a little

while before finally the Fed starts deploying officials to try to tamp it down. They usually

reserve Powell for the harshest version of this.

This happened what feels like a half dozen times last year, but the most notable was the Jackson

Hull speech at the central banker's big event in August. Apparently, Powell's planned speech was

scrapped at the last minute for the eight-minute speech we got, which really threw cold water

...